I’m drowsy and confused in the early morning light as my brain struggles to piece together where I am and why I’m burning alive and my sheets are turquoise. I remember it’s my birthday. I turn to fully take in my human space heater in all his still slumbering mystique. Sleep separates. We may be in our most vulnerable state, but sleep creates an impenetrable boundary. I’m never more aware of my aloneness in this world than when I’m next to a sleeping person; so wholly themselves, but so unreachable to me. What’s even more isolating is that when those eyes open, the ocean between us won’t close. As I study his copper hair and large nose and begin to subconsciously memorize the wrinkles in his neck, I realize there’s nothing obviously beautiful about this man. His physical pieces on their own don’t suggest beauty at all in fact…but I’m taken with him.
The alarm sounds and I pretend to stir awake in time with him as though I wrote the book on new-lover morning etiquette. Notice me. He pulls me to him and I’ve won. I’m groggy and ready for anything, but his face decidedly presses against my chest and he hugs me like his life depends on breathing me in. And there we lay until the snooze runs out on his alarm; a far too short eternity during which my feelings suddenly shift. You know that moment when you fall off a cliff you never saw coming and suddenly you are attached to this half conscious man in your bed. It was fun, it was light and then suddenly someone inhales and exhales on your sternum and your world is upside down. It’s such a pity we don’t have more control over these moments- a say in the matter - but the juxtaposition of his selfish sleep and the illusion that he somehow needed me was too much for my easily duped emotions.
None of it matters now, and I’ve moved onto futures of many similar moments with new someones, but these little fleeting events in life that wake you…metaphorically or literally (and in my case both) - they’re so golden. Even if one giant misinterpretation – it’s so worth it to be reminded that you CAN feel; that things won’t always be just fun and light. That your emotions (though easily duped) are still a functioning part of you. You’re human, you’re alive, and you are going to be just fine.
