WANTING

Wanting is problematic. Maybe. Of course we all want things. I want a lot of things. But sometimes I wonder if I actually want what I want, or if the wanting is covering up something else, some kind of desire. Which I know is also wanting. Or maybe a fear, or an anxiety. If I got the thing I think I want, I might not want it at all. Or maybe I would just want something else. And maybe I am doing the grass is greener thing.

My friend just told me a funny story about her husband driving her crazy by flailing around in his sleep, and making horrible snorty snoring noises, and how she wanted to fling him out the window, or maybe smother him with a pillow, and how amazing it feels to sleep on her own. And I know she loves him. A lot. They have a healthy, strong marriage.

I want to sleep with someone again. Sleep. I’m not talking about sex. Yes, I want that too of course, but I’m talking about actual sleep. Sometimes, when I crawl into my cozy, comfortable, beautifully appointed bed in my elegant bedroom, a room that is full of plants, and art, and rich, saturated colors, and fluttering curtains over a sliding glass door that leads onto a private patio garden and lets a gentle breeze cool the room, I feel a sense of emptiness so visceral that I can barely swallow. Tears sting my eyes, and my breathing accelerates, and I have to actively talk myself down from crying. On a regular weeknight. Not every night. But more than once in a while.

My ex-partner and I slept shockingly well together. We fell asleep holding hands. Every night. Actually. We had two main positions. Usually he spooned me, his right arm slid beneath my body, his left arm around my waist. I would reach up to hold his right hand with my left. If my hip began to ache before I fell asleep, I would roll onto my left side and tuck my head against his shoulder. He would stay on his back, our hands clasped, our feet and legs tangled at the foot of the bed. Every night. The first few months after we broke up, I literally felt nauseous in my bed alone. Falling asleep took hours, and I would wake up multiple times in the night.

Since he moved out a year and a half ago, I’ve had sleepovers with three different men, but only a few times each. On those nights, I never got more than a few hours of sleep. One snored so absurdly that I would have thought he was playing a practical joke if he hadn’t warned me in advance. I wore earplugs, and still felt like a dump truck was thundering through the room. The bed shook. He was practically having a seizure every five minutes all night long. The other two were more average sleepers. But still, even after a sleep-inducing orgasm, I was hot and restless and hyper-conscious of the presence of another human in the bed. Maybe it was like that with my ex at first. This seems likely. I try to remember. But all my body recalls is how well we fit.

I’m currently in the midst of something of a situationship with R. I don’t think it will become more. It could. But I don’t think so. We’ve been hanging out on and off, and have had sex a number of times over the past several months, at both his house and mine, but never spent the night together. He’s resistant. I’ve tried to get him to stay, and he’s made excuses. Once he did say we could “plan a sleepover” but I don’t think he meant it. He’s not ready, and he might never be. I want him to sleep over. But why? Do I actually want to sleep with him? See how it feels? Am I searching for that warm, safe, close feeling I got from sleeping with my ex? Will a sleepover signal to me that R is ready for more intimacy? Does spending the whole night, actually sleeping together, mean that we’re saying we’re ready to experience each other with morning breath, eye crusties, crazy bed-head? Do I want that with him, or do I just want him to want that with me? What if we sleep together, and I’m hot and restless and I don’t get any sleep? Will that make me feel like he’s not the right guy? Am I taking a connection that was particular to a specific person and trying to layer it on to whoever sort of comes along next?

I have read more than one article about how sleeping next to a person who loves you makes you live longer, and improves your health in a variety of ways. Those articles have made me cry. I believe them. I also read the ones about how many hugs you need a day to have optimal health. I don’t get hugged enough. Or kissed almost ever, except for when my situation guy shows up once every week or two, and then he kisses the shit out of me, and I think I could possibly fall in love with him, except I also think maybe he’s just an amazing kisser, and my body is in such desperate need of being kissed that it feels like the possibility of love. When I think that, I also start to think that maybe I should just move in the direction of friends with benefits, find a couple of casual situations with really good lovers and get my body taken care of on a more regular basis.

I got sick last year. Right before New Year’s. Really really sick. And I never get sick. But last December I got a virus. Two days after Christmas I came down with a high fever. 103. My kids stayed with their dad so they wouldn’t get it. My best friend and I had a New Year’s Eve trip planned to Palm Springs. But I was so sick. My fever stayed high. I felt nauseous and weak and exhausted. I tried to rally, staggered around packing on the 30^th, but at 2am in a feverish sweat, I had to call and leave her a message that there was no way I could hop on a plane the next day, that she had to go on her own. I went downhill from there. I couldn’t shake the fever. I couldn’t eat. My head pounded so badly I couldn’t read, or watch TV. My best friend was on our trip by herself. My mom wanted to come help, but she’s in her 80’s, and I was scared to give her my horrible germs. My little brother offered to bring groceries, but I couldn’t eat anything anyway, and he has an infant. I didn’t want to get the baby sick. But as December slid in January, I slid in and out of delirium, waking every few hours drenched in sweat, my sheets completely soaked through. I managed to drink some water and stumble to the guest bed. Day turned to night. I soaked through another set of sheets. Everything hurt. I couldn’t shower, or keep any food down. I tried to pull the sheets off the bed, but I was too weak to change them. Finally, I lay down on the floor and called my brother.

Can you come help me change the beds?

He came over right away. Oh my god, he said. You’re so fucked up. I’ve never seen you like this.

I know, I said. But it’s a virus. I just need to rest.

My fever was still at 103. It had been six days. I finally called back my bestie in Palm Springs.

Oh my god! she said. That is not okay. You need to go to the hospital right now.

Noooooo, I said. It’s a virus. I just need to rest.

Fuck that, she said. I’m calling your mom. You’re going to the ER.

They gave me an IV and a chest x-ray. Turns out the virus had morphed into bacterial pneumonia. I had lost ten pounds. It took weeks for me to feel like myself again.

I had never been sick and single. Not since my twenties. Even though I was physically recovered by mid-January, I struggled with uncharacteristic sadness throughout the rest of winter. Nothing had ever felt as deeply lonely as being sick like that with no one obvious to take care of me, no one to witness, to say hey, you’re not okay, let’s get you to the doctor.

I don’t think that’s one of the benefits of friends with benefits.

But sometimes I want to be touched so badly I feel like my skin is curling away from my body, tiny tendrils of yearning peeling toward the possibility of someone who doesn’t yet exist.

I want to be grateful. Count my blessings. Want what I have instead of what’s missing.

But maybe that’s just more wanting. 

SURRENDER

I wrote the above section on wanting during my writing group session a couple of hours ago. Then I took a walk with a friend and headed back to the house. I had a maybe date set up with, R, the situationship guy, but he texted that he was running late, we would probably have to reschedule, he would call me later. This made me sad, as that night was my only free night without my kids the whole week. I took a deep breath, and opened the writing from earlier, and dug back in. The passage on sickness brought tears to my eyes. Writing into the loneliness that pervaded my life after my ex broke my heart was intensely painful. As I tapped at the keys, excavating the forlorn gray winter that followed his exodus, tears slid down my cheeks and solitude seeped through my body.

My phone vibrated. A text from my teenage son, who was supposed to be at his dad’s house.

hey im outside

it’s cool if ur busy but if ur chilling i have a new piano song

so yk whatever’s cool

I wiped at my face as I popped up from the chaise and hustled to grab a tissue.

One sec I texted back.

He played Clair de Lune three times. I lay on the couch with my eyes closed, listening, and allowed the tears to flow again. When he stopped and peered town at me, a glimmer of pride swept his face.

“I knew that would make you cry,” he said. “It’s good, right? So emotional.”

After he left, I looked at the writing again. A strange buoyancy loosened the knot in my chest, eased the tension in my shoulders. At the very moment I was forcing myself to sit in the pain of having no one, my child literally appeared in my doorway, asking for nothing, his only desire to play music for me, a soothing lullaby, a journey to introspection, a meditation on the soul in all its phases.

I glanced at my phone. While my son was playing, I had missed a call from R. I blew my nose again and called him back. We chatted for a bit, then I gave him a little shit for being unwilling to hang out on my only free night, even though it was only 8:30pm, and he lived just a few miles away. I wasn’t surprised though, as I know he gets up at 4am on weekdays, and prioritizes his sleep. Then we continued to converse, and as usual, we got into a great conversation: honest, substantive, values driven, and for me, very engaging. Around 9pm, he paused.

“Hey,” he said. “How about we continue this conversation in person?”

“What?” I said. This was very out of character for R. “You mean, like I should come over?”

“You don’t want to?”

“No, I do. Like right now?”

“Yeah.”

We stayed up til midnight.

“Shit,” he said. “It’s late.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know you have to get up really early.” I paused, then glanced over to where he sprawled naked in bed. “So,” I began carefully, “what do you want me to do? Do you want me to stay, or do you want me to head out? I know you’ve had a thing about sleepovers.”

There was a beat of silence.

“Well,” he said. “What do you want to do?”

“I want to go to sleep.”

“Okay,” he said. And he leaned over and kissed me.

I wonder about this. About my family showing up on my doorstep as I confront my belief that I am essentially alone. About spending the night with a man for the first time right after putting in writing that he was unwilling. If I were to write this into my novel, I believe the timing would come off as implausible, contrived, a rom-com situation we all know would never happen in real life.

Now, a week later, I have thought about that day over and over again. And here is what I am choosing to believe. That sometimes, when we need it the most—not want, or hope for, but are on the brink of shifting wrongly in our self-concept, our essential sense of truth and reality—the universe will offer us a glimmer, a kindness, a breath of love to remind us that underneath the fog and fear, the disappointment and contradiction, there is still light.

– Lindsay Krumbein