Sleeping Sickness

“I put the slippery sheets on the bed, you coming over?”

I wish he had never mentioned that he liked those ones better. I only have 2 sets and I change them every Sunday. Panda says it’s the only consistent thing in my life.

She is not wrong.

Everything else ebbs and flows, changes and rearranges whether I want it to or not.
I wonder if this is why I hate moving so much, I like my things where I like them. Something about my psyche is so tired of everything fluctuating. These people places and things beyond my control, I need sanctuary.

But what happens when you let the boy into your house? Into your bed?

Sanctuary isn’t so safe anymore. Memory foam pillows hold memories.

Suddenly there are holes in the landscape that I am forced to navigate around. Sometimes I forget and fall in.
Sometimes the trigger is something as redundant as a song, a taste or the feeling of high thread count Egyptian cotton sheets caressing my tired self after a long day out in the world

I used to love clean sheet day.

I would change them in the morning go have adventures all day and return home to the pleasant surprise. I am a goldfish girl for sure. Short attention span.

Now it stings a little even though the sheets are soft and my bed is warm.

I didn’t make my bed before I went away. When I came home it was how we left it and he crawled back in like nothing had changed.

But it had.

The psychic said in no uncertain terms he was lying to me. She described him perfectly. Her words tasted like truth in my mouth as I mulled it over. But it wasn’t bitter. So it didn’t matter. I liked his mouth too much to care, lies or no.

I missed my bed while I was away.

I missed him while I was away.

I miss him now that he has gone the way o the others, which is away.

This has been on A-rotation since I got home…

Touch down on the red eye
I got red eyes too
Headache from the red wine
No sleep when I think about you
When I think about you

Cold sweat on a hot night
A little late night caffeine
Keep me from my own mind
No sleep when I dream about you
When I dream about you

If I stop for a minute
If I sink back in it
It’ll hurt like hell
If I slip for a minute
If I stop forgetting
It’ll hurt like hell

Yeah, you hurt like hell

First bite in a long time
Reading last week’s news
Hit snooze for the third time
No sleep when I sleep without you
When I sleep without you

(Hurt Like Hell ~ Heydaze)

I have had a hard time sleeping, bed feels cold and empty when it’s just me.

I have a harder time not missing him on Sundays.
It was my only guaranteed day off and he’d invariably come over.
Get the freshly washed sheets dirty.
But before that we would braid our limbs on the couch, make pillow forts, wrap ourselves in blankets and each other, and talk over movies in hushed whispers. Kiss each other for no reason other than we could and we wanted to.
I spent last Sunday wrapped in a blanket on the couch and my skin remembered his.
It hasn’t been long enough for my cells to regenerate.
My body quite literally ached with the want for him to be touching me.
And I was alone in the house. No fortress of blankets and pillows and boy arms holding me together, keeping me safe.

I got through it.

This too shall pass.

I added a bag of Doritos to the nostalgic war on my senses. He was always getting hungry for junk food in the middle of the night. I kept chocolate and chips in the house for him. Bought juice for the first time in a long time so he had something to drink in the morning.

I miss him stealing my sleep, stealing kisses, stealing the blankets.

My skin loved him, I had that plasma ball feeling again. Purple tendrils of energy and light reaching out from my core dancing along the synapses and nerve ending following the paths made by his fingertips.

Hadn’t felt that in a good long while.

Met both those fire-fingered boys in the same place, almost on the same day, a year apart.

And they are both gone.

I am a year older and wiser. I only cried the once this time.
Last time I had never ending tsunamis raging and storming in my tear ducts.
I cried biblical proportions 40 days and 40 nights.

I couldn’t get out of bed.

This time I just changed my sheets and moved on with my life.

Except Sunday. And the time I pulled those sheets out of the dryer, because I knew they would never smell like him again and it kinda hurt like hell.

If it gets bad I will burn them and buy new ones. But I don’t think it will come to that.

If there were two of them, that means there are more and we will find each other in the dark.