An Ode to the Early-to-Bed Party

The night ends on our terms.

She generally goes to bed much earlier than me.

Most people do. I like to keep somewhat strange hours. Well, I don’t like it so much as I have a lot of trouble sleeping — always have, since I was a little kid, an insomniac since infancy — and don’t get much of it, so sometimes I push it to near-exhaustion in hopes I’ll get a little bit of REM in before the sun comes up and another day begins. And I’ve always loved the night. I’m more productive in the dark and during the early-morning hours than I am at other times of day, when most people do the majority of their toiling.

She, on the other hand, likes to wake up early and get things done before the day around us really gets going. I suppose she buys into the notion (as do I) that true glory is not always achieved between 9AM and 5PM. And when she does this she tries her best not to wake me, though that’s a fool’s errand. Part of my being bad at sleep is also being a super-light slumberer. Sometimes I think I don’t so much sleep as drift in and out of consciousness. I won’t know if it’s a dream or reality and sometimes I’ll get up multiple times at night to have a piss (another barrier to entry into the realms of deep sleep) and then fall right back into the scenario of one of the several recurring dreams running through my brain during a specific era of my life. It’s not fun — as these dreams are often very weird and not generally in a good way.

But on the night or two or so we spend together weekly in my one-bedroom apartment, she’ll almost always stay up with me on the couch in front of the TV for as long as I want — and I can generally tell when she’s starting to wane, when she’s more than ready to hit the sack but is hanging in the best she can, attempting to eek out the moments we spend together in a mostly awake manner.

“Want to go finish this episode of Dateline in bed?” I’ll ask, and she’ll say, without hesitance, “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

And we do — making the short trip from living room to bedroom (the first in an apartment I’ve rented alone that has an actual door separating those two venues), with respective stops to the restroom along the way.