Falling In Sleep

One of the telltale signs I’ve been traveling, I haven’t been sleeping, or I’m not comfortable in place--I wake with a start, an odd hour, still half-dreaming. I think I’m asleep somewhere I’m not supposed to be: someone else’s home, or an office, or with someone else in the room I hadn't expected, and I grow self-conscious. I cover up. Put on extra clothes, pull the covers over myself. I wipe away drool, ready to engage with another human.

And I wake again. For real. Alone or with Heather and Riley, or in a hotel room with a friend in the next bed. In a context that makes sense in the real life context of my life, in which I don’t have anything to hide or be ashamed of.

My first memory of being embarrassed be asleep in front of someone: I’m in my grandparents’ house in Queens, where part of the living room is partitioned off into a makeshift dining/storage/guest room area. This is where my sister and I sleep because my grandparents slept in separate bedrooms, because my grandfather snored. Mom and Dad slept in the remaining proper bedroom.

My mother and father were early risers, but my grandparents got up earlier. I woke to the sound of water being poured from a kettle to make tea. The space was foreign, the hour early. I didn’t get up yet. I’ve always been pretty good at falling back asleep. But when I woke again, I found my grandparents, Mom and Dad, and my sister all up--worse yet, those times when I woke to my aunt and uncle in the house, calling me sleepyhead because it was eight o’clock. I was embarrassed to be that last one asleep, that little kid of the family. I told my sister to wake me up if I were still asleep when she got up in the morning.

And then there were those long car rides to New York, when I would get carsick and sleep was my best bet to keep myself occupied without feeling like I was going to throw up. And yet, I was embarrassed to be asleep too long. Or too soon. Or too close to our destination. I remember willing myself awake only to nod off again and will myself awake in a cycle over the course of hours.

Years later, an all-night poetry “lock-in” on the eve of spring break. I stayed awake until three or four in the morning, woke at six or seven. My mom picked me up to spend the first weekend of the break at her apartment in Syracuse, before I went back home. That night, we watched Amelie on her little tube TV, from a VHS I’d recorded from the campus TV station that showed films that were out of the theater but not yet available for purchase. I promptly fell asleep for the vast majority of the film. And I recall an in-between sensation. This embarrassment, still, at falling asleep, because falling asleep was childish, counterbalanced with a logical reason to be tired. Maybe I was just too tired to care.

But then, what of sleeping on airplanes? I’ve done it, probably dozens of times now. The combined effects of sitting stationary, of changes in altitude, of recycled air, of cramped quarters, of people around me sleeping and thus normalizing it, the effects of coming off a trip in which I likely didn’t sleep so much for work purposes, or a raucous reunion, or the sheer disorientation of a foreign bed. But what of this public sleep? Leaving myself seen, exposed?

And what of sleeping with Heather? The first time I've slept--really, literally slept--with any partner there has been a certain sense of something alien to it. And yet, on our first night together, after a day together, our first date, after talking until the wee hours of the night, we slept side by side on her bed, above the covers, clothed, each with an arm over the side of our heads, holding hands.

And I slept.

I’ve slept not only in bed or on planes with her. I’ve slept while she drives, while she watches TV on the other side of the couch.

I suppose this is learned behavior, but a strange sort I’ve grown out of and into--to feel comfortable enough with rest in someone else’s space. To trust this.

To wake, not embarrassed, but refreshed, or still half in dream, and ready to retreat to bed for the rest of the night.

That first date with Heather, I'd have readily admitted I'd fallen for her. But falling asleep? There may have been something even more intimate in that.