a message from my marital bed.

A fun little fact about me is that I sleep on average between 2-4 hours a night. This is not a flex, this is a cry for help.

This is due I am told, post sleep study, to sleep apnea, a condition that causes me to wake myself up before I’m ever able to reach deep sleep, but also besieges my partner with the most horrific snoring ever recorded (on his phone, after months of complaint, shown to me with pleading in his eyes).

I’ve tried breathe right strips which would work until they didn’t*, I’ve tried mouth tape, a mouth guard, a ridiculous chin strap and now finally I’ve jumped through enough institutional hoops to be granted a CPAP machine, a device I’ve been told, by both medical professionals and users alike, will change my life. For surely, if what I’ve accomplished in the last decade is me on a meager 2 hours of sleep a night, imagine what I could do with this machine’s assistance? (Maybe actually win an Emmy this time).

Unfortunately after a few weeks of heading off to bed looking like a fighter pilot on life support, I fear I may have been oversold on how much my life would change.

I possibly have curbed the snoring enough for my partner to finally fall asleep unencumbered by the concert of my nose and mouth intaking air at such an angle and velocity that it sounds like the revving engine of a vehicle straight off of fury road. But still, by the middle of the night the discomfort from the mask wakes me after my usual handful of hours and I’m left stewing angrily in bed while my partner, no white noise machine himself, sputters next to me.

This in of itself is not some great punishment I will admit. One of the great pleasures of being both an insomniac and early riser is the time I get to spend observing my boyfriend** sleep. There is no way to write that sentence that will make everyone happy, but trust me I tried. It’s creepy, it’s saccharine, it’s banal. But it’s true.

I have a folder on my phone dedicated to pictures of him at rest. In our bed, in the car, on a plane. I think I keep taking them hoping that upon looking at them I can create the same burst of chemicals that flood my brain every time I see it live and in person, a fix I often find myself craving when I’m on the road alone. But none of them quite work the way you’d hope. It’s similar to a piece of nicotine gum— you may be satisfying some unconscious physical need, but you ultimately know that you’re chewing a piece of fucking gum right? Gum will never be glamour and a picture of bubba asleep will never make me giddy or protective or expectant. Waiting for that moment when his eyes start to stir and I know another day with him is about to begin.

My partner has almost the complete opposite condition as mine, as he struggles so much to rouse himself that he’s set up a kind of Rube Goldberg machine of alarms that require both critical thinking and jumping out of bed to perform both physical tasks and scanning the bar code of something upstairs in the kitchen. But every time he adds another leg in this relay race, he somehow finds a way to do it with enough sleep left in him that he can return to REM almost immediately.

I rarely meddle in his process. He’s an adult after all, and as soon as I become entangled in the arduous task of getting him out of bed on a regular Tuesday, I’ve entered into the non sexual kind of daddy territory that holds very little interest for me.

There are of course moments (both sexually and with regards to what I’m currently writing about) that call on me to be daddy. Getting him up on a vacation or for an early flight has become a responsibility that I still somehow greet with a gameness that is only made possible by the performance I am greeted with each time I’m tasked with doing it. I’ve never seen anything like it, someone going through each of the seven stages of grief at 9AM after a full night’s sleep.

Shock: It’s what time?

Denial: It can’t be time.

Anger: Fuck off.

Bargaining: Just seventeen more minutes?

Depression: *Single tear rolls down his cheek.

Reconstruction: I’m up, I’m up.

Acceptance: Will you order me a breakfast burrito?

No one wants to let him sleep more than I do, though. It’s when I feel most possessive, most base and caveman-like in my love for him. I go full top mode when he’s asleep next to me, in part because all pretense falls off his face when he’s asleep and there’s a softness and innocence there that makes me feel a primal instinct to protect and defend and it’s in these moments I am the most sure that this is the man I’m going to protect and defend and kiss and fuck and laugh with for the rest of my life.

I do ultimately want to sleep though. I have no idea how long I’ve been living on such little sleep, at least as long as I’ve been with my partner, who first noticed the frequent gasps for air that would wake me every fifteen minutes or so, something I have no recollection of each morning. I’ve even called for him in my sleep, unable to breathe, crying out for help. This again I have no memory of. All this is obviously disturbing to him, and as much as the snoring keeps him up, so too does his concern for my actual life.

I hate that he worries about me. Something I fear I’ve brought to his life in a lot of different ways, but this is already too long to get into all that. You’re very kind for making it even here.

I want to sleep again. But until I do I’ll continue to enjoy being the one awake, the one in love.

[* fun fact, breathe right strips do somehow make it easier to give head, if you were wondering. This discovered like all great scientific discoveries completely on accident. Normally at this stage of winding down, contacts out, glasses on, breathe right strip affixed, the window for anything carnal has long since closed. But when you’re in a long term relationship it’s important to shake yourself out of habitual horniness and go with the flow, so there I found myself. Dome game taken to the next level. Just food for thought.]

[**I can hear you all screaming “fiancé” now but I’m sorry I hate the word and I’m struggling to adjust to it. Partner feels co-opted by the crunchy and the vague. Boyfriend, you’re right isn’t quite right anymore. I never expected to be a fiancé to be quite honest. I don’t think either of us were rushing to get gay married when we entered into the relationship and very easily could’ve been the types to be boyfriends under the eyes of the law for multiple decades and then die. But love sort of warped my brain and I happened to become rich at some point in our relationship and wanted to throw a big party while we’re young enough to enjoy it and there’s also the thing about children which I’ll get into at a later date. So give me some time for it to sit right, and trust no one is more aware that I’m engaged than I am.]