Sincerely, I never have. Well, in the past year or so I have, better than ever in my life but that’s not the point. Neither is the fact I’ve finally found a medication balance that helps me sleep. Definitely not the point.
The point is that I should have seen it sooner. I’ve had so many “I should have seen it coming” moments in the past three years it’s truly baffling sometimes. Was having a conversation recently about sleep versus sex and which I prefer (obviously sleep). How the other person implied that they understood old people now, that sleep is more important these days.
It took me aback because sleep has always been my number one priority to a point that it’s confusing to think that anything would surpass it. Sex certainly didn’t. But that means that most people feel the opposite. And how odd an idea that is. That I’m the aberration for thinking in the way that makes the most sense.
Even at the depths of unbearable truest love I’ve always known I slept better alone, been more at peace alone, more content, more able to focus, more creative. Everything that makes me Me requires oodles of alone time and yet when people love you they want all your time with them which of course renders me mute.
I always wrote my best and expressed myself most beautifully when I’ve had my needed solitude. Writing more made them want me around more which took away my voice. Every time.
And I’d want time with them. I needed it desperately, more than they could have imagined. My time with them was full so quickly though, after a date night or a weekend I’d be sated and ready for time alone to recover. But they always wanted more which stole the essence of myself, and I’d have to steal my days alone back. And they’d hate me for it, thinking I didn’t love them as deeply as I truly did, and I couldn’t show it to them because to them it was avoidance and loneliness. Not solitude sweet and pure but an act of repulsion or rejection.
So it was always a choice. And I chose them first again and again, chose them over my Me, and stopped writing as I had before. Not as often, not as essentially myself.
And that’s the way they, being everyone, thinks it should be. That love is sacrifice. But my love isn’t a sacrifice and never needs to be.
I’ll say it again. My love is not a sacrifice.
It’s amazing how the normativity of being in a romantic relationship is just shoved down our throats. And I know why. It keeps commerce going. Keeps putting money in the pockets of the rich. Because romantic relationships equal buying homes and making a family and buying holiday gifts and big weddings and traditions. For making us all spend money. So businesses push romantic norms on us and we push it on one another because we think it’s normal.
And because of that “normal” I still question myself in blips of half moments and think I could be in a traditional romantic partnership. Or several.
Blips of half moments though of course, for as I mentioned before I should have known because I was always happiest in solitude. I knew it. I just didn’t give myself credit because I’m just a weird girl with weird ideas in a brain that makes connections across gaps not many do.
I should have seen it coming that I’d find it to be my chosen state of being. Being alone. And it’s just as comforting and satisfying as it was being alone during lunch in high school, reading in the quiet library rather than in the unbearable echoing cafeteria.
Hell is other people. And sleep is more important than sex, always.
A Burd in Flight 