The Incapability of going to bed alone

there are some activities in life that need to be shared. so for those who eat or drive alone, there always seems to be a big question mark sitting opposite them, or in the passengers seat. There's nothing to ask when people are with others. A meal shared, or a ride shared by two consensual people. It's never a subject up for debate. It's obvious. Humans are creatures of company. so when the activities that require mutuality are performed alone, they simply look out of place.

I couldn't sleep, and debbie was gone. it was only the first night and i couldn't lay on that bed. how was i going to cope, night after night? me, facing that giant landscape of a queen sized bed? i feared i would turn into an insomniac. though back when i was single, i practically was, and i thought i was cool by being it. staying up every night until your eyes burned, and couldn't focus on any one thing. it felt as though my will was fighting my very own self. it made me feel that i was in control of my life, my slow aging body. sometimes i wouldn't even make it to my bed. and most nights i would sleep in my clothes.

i knew things would change when she left. going to bed used to be one of the better parts of my day. the comfort of our hugs became a drill, a moment of closeness i treasured. it didn't seem to matter if one was wide a wake when the other wanted to hit the sack, we clocked out at the same time. it was in bed that we made our plans together. it was where we first named our unborn children. it was where we heard each other's dreams while they were only images in our sleep. it was where we budgeted the money, debated religion and culture, and also what we thought of the movies we had just seen, and books we were currently reading. all this and the sex, we shared on that bed. that box spring represented a world we lived in and invented all at the same time.

a new country in the U.N

a new dominican

a governors house, made by foreigners hands.

so when debbie left, those twenty odd steps to the bed seemed impossible. maybe it would get better, but for now that one thing we shared would be faced alone. i began to remember my father, when my mother, on the very rare occasion went away for the weekend, leaving my father with the similar jaunt of facing an empty mattress. he was a man, a husband of 26 years, now a defenseless animal unable to perform the simplest of maneuvers on his own. he never cooked, and he never went to bed at his regular 10pm. he stayed up all night with me, watching movie after movie. every now and then he would turn his head to the staircase aware that he should have been sleep hours ago; but he never moved. i couldn't believe how paralyzed he was without my mother. my parents were never passionate people. they weren't huggers or public kisser. they were practical. their love was like an ebb at the bottom of the ocean that you'd never knew existed, but it lived, gently and unnoticed. and because of hat way of expression, i never saw my parents as husband and wife; not until we spent those late nights together on the couch. then i saw a man embedded to a relationship day and night. A love so rooted, so committed that it controlled him, even to the contradictions of his own body, much like the times of my youth. but when i looked at my father, it wasn't the arrogance of the young that i saw, but the sweet possession of true love.

why was it so disabling to be in love? was he whipped? or was it just the result of giving yourself to someone completely. i've known in my own relationships that there is a lot of give, far less than the take. i was surprised watching my father, at the possessive effect of being that fundamentally committed to another person. i couldn't recognize in my father then, or me now, if either I or my father had become weak? maybe i was just seeing one side to the story. maybe my mother, while away sat up and played sudoku all night in the attempt to sleep herself.

the one thing i did know was whatever happened to my dad at those times, was now happening to me now; we both had the incapability of going to bed alone.