Love is . . .

I require, on average, 12-14 hours of sleep. I can get by with 8-10. 6 or less and I know I’m going to need a nap. My favorite part of the day is just as I climb into bed, snuggling between the sheets, curling my toes up and burrowing into the blanket and pillows. I curl up and for a half hour or so I have my own personal time. Everything is pitch dark, the cold bed slowly warms up, I drift into my imaginary world. The worries and tensions of the day get lost in the stories and dream worlds I conjure up for myself. The excitements of the day get built into larger than life joys as I form a little burrito smack in the middle of my bed, rolled up in blankets and pillows, eyes scrunched tight, my head and my heart cooling down as I drift into sleep.

When I sleep over at D’s or when he sleeps over, it is a different story altogether. For one, I can only lay a claim to half of the bed and half of the blanket. It becomes next to impossible to burrito myself. I try, of course, by wrapping him around me instead of the blankets. And while it’s wonderful to entangle myself with him, it is also pretty much impossible to fall asleep when you’re snuggling with a person instead of blankets. His chest is my pillow, but as I engage myself in discerning the secrets his heartbeat is telling me, I am too lost in him, in the being with him, to be able to get lost in my own solitary world. Just as I am falling asleep I worry that I’m crushing his arm. Just as he’s falling asleep I burrow into his neck. I slide down the middle of the bed towards him; I take all of the covers; the pillow doesn’t sit quite right on one side of the bed.
In the morning it is just a little bit harder to wake up with the alarm clock than it is when he isn’t there.

So why is it, then, that I feel robbed of something if one of us has an exam the next day or an early start, and so can’t spend the night? Why do I feel lonely on the nights I sleep alone even as I revel in the pre-sleep self-burrito-ing and spread myself luxuriously and diagonally across my bed? Why am I so willing to not get 12 hours of sleep even when it is otherwise possible? Why do I train myself to get a full night’s sleep with him?

I don’t quite know. Perhaps it’s the waking up with a smile that does it.