Performance of Everyday Life [Week 6] : SLEEP

October 15th, 2024: WEEK 6

Sleepy Bean

Reading(that inspired the work): Nik Wakefield, “Sleep, Laziness and Making” 

Performance Prompt: Narrate your own observation of another sleeping

Media: Written

Dear Reader,

Sleep is no friend of mine.  I do not get rest, I do not wake up, I do not feel rejuvenated, and I do not dream.

But I see him sleep and it is beautiful.  My beautiful bean.  He curls up, closes his eyes and drifts away, I know not where.

I woke up early this morning to watch him sleep.  I should do it more often.  The lights aren’t on and, in my basement apartment, the only light that comes into the room is through the staircase and the small window that looks up into the moat that sits between my building at the street.

He lays to my right, back facing me, curled in a fetal position.  I can feel the heat pouring off of his body warming me from across my twin bed.  He’s often warm, certainly warmer than I am, but it’s only when he sleeps that he radiates that heat.  My hands and toes freeze and I long to press him up against his body, but I know if I do, I’ll wake him.

He snores, but not in the morning.  Now he’s completely peaceful.  I can imagine the feel of his skin.  At almost 20 years my senior, his skin is softer than mine.  Not the softness that comes with a life of ease, he’s not had that, nor the softness that comes with a strenuous skincare routine, he’s certainly not the type.  It’s a naturally soft skin; pure genetic luck.  An additional kind of luck that I get to touch it and hold it while he sleeps.

Turned from me, he’s one shade of pink, from the top of his bald head to the tuft of hair just about his pink rump.  He’s my sleepy bean.  My gentling breathing jelly bean.

My love isn’t hogging the bed… as he sometimes does… his stubble isn’t scratching me as it often does when he falls asleep on my chest.  Our beds are our places of greatest sensation and greatest relaxation, but for him, they are always a place of release.

I can feel a knot in my stomaching thinking about the ease he gets in beds and on couches.  The speed with which his brain and body accommodate themselves to cushions pillows… the speed they move on from them to wakefulness.  The knot is jealousy.

I want to wake him.  I want to wake him now.  To explain that I can’t do what he does; one of the many things he does that I cannot… but me waking up first is such a… rarity that I don’t want him to know I got up before him at all.

I’m going to join him.  I know I can make our minds in a place as close as our bodies.  Slow wake up be damned.  Rough and rude awakenings go to hell.

It’ll be worth it to be with him, a silent partner in his dreams

And I know, when he wakes, I will be a better man.