I Was Never Actually Going to Sleep

There is a particular kind of silence that happens late, when you're lying in a bed that's too big, in a city that isn't yours, and the only light in the room is the phone you're holding above your face like an absolute idiot.

The glow that turns your knuckles the color of cheap amber. The screen where his name sits in a little bubble at the top, the last message hanging there unanswered because you'd been staring at it, scared to type too fast.

You type the three words. "I'm going to sleep." Or maybe it's "I'm tired." Or sometimes it's just the laziest possible goodbye, the one that costs nothing to send.

Three syllables and a period. The period is important. It signals you mean it. It signals you're a grown woman with a 7am alarm who definitely doesn't care if he replies in the next ninety seconds.

Except it does. The whole thing does. And he doesn't know that.

Or maybe he does. Maybe that's the part that actually kills you.

I spent two years in a long-distance thing with a man who lived up north. We met at a friend's wedding in Lisbon, one of those weekends where everyone drinks too much vino verde and says things to strangers they'd never say sober. He was a structural engineer. He had this way of looking at you like he was calculating load-bearing capacities. I thought it meant depth.

I was twenty-six. I didn't know the difference yet between a man studying you and a man simply checking the foundation.

Anyway. We went back to our respective cities. And every night, right around the time the street noise outside my window got quieter and the radiator finally clicked off, I would type "I'm going to sleep." It became ritual. A small ceremony of abandonment. I would watch the three dots appear, disappear, appear again.

Most nights he'd say "good night baby" and leave it at that. Sometimes he'd try, say "sleep well, dream of me," which I also hated because it sounded like a postcard. And sometimes he would say nothing at all, and I would lie there in the dark, fully awake, fully wired, telling myself his silence was probably about work, probably about his roommate, probably about anything except the fact that he had stopped being curious about whether I was actually tired.

The cat would shift on the end of the bed. The fridge in the kitchen would click on. I would stare at a wrinkle in the pillowcase and trace it with my thumbnail until it frayed; I was never actually going to sleep.

Not then. Not most nights. I was performing exhaustion because I didn't have the vocabulary for what I really wanted to say, which was: Don't let the conversation end. Don't let me be the one holding the screen. Don't let me be the one who has to pretend I have somewhere better to be at midnight on a Tuesday. Tell me something, Anything. Make me feel like I exist outside of this little glowing rectangle.

But you can't say that. Not at twenty-six. Not at thirty. Not ever, really, if you've been taught that wanting someone makes you pathetic. So you say "I'm going to sleep" and you watch the phone the way you watch a stove to see if the water is going to boil. And if he responds with the wrong thing, "okay, sleep well" with that flat, conclusive punctuation, you close your eyes and feel something tiny and poisonous snap inside your chest.

You tell yourself you have a meeting at nine. You tell yourself you should be asleep anyway, but you don't sleep. You lie there for another hour, scrolling through Instagram, looking at apartments in cities you've never been to, calculating how many trains it would take to get to him. You compose and delete three different messages.

You almost type "are you still up?" and then you don't, because asking twice is worse than asking zero times. You know this. Every woman knows this. We all know this math. This stupid math we learn without being taught, from our mothers, from our friends, from our own failed attempts.

A friend told me once that the first time she knew she loved her boyfriend was when he said "let's video call" instead of "okay sleep tight." It was close to 3am. She'd been crying in the bathroom because her mother had said something cutting. She'd typed the soft goodbye expecting the usual dismissal. Instead he called.

His face was puffy with sleep. He didn't ask what was wrong. He just sat there with his camera on while she brushed her teeth and put on her moisturizer and did all the small, humiliating things women do at the end of the day, the face she would've hidden from anyone. What made it sexy was that he had refused to let her disappear.

At a wedding, when my aunt was fifty-eight and we'd had too much wine, she told me that the man she eventually married won her not with grand gestures but with one specific sentence every night for the first year of them. Not "I love you." Not "you're beautiful." Just: "go to sleep, stop ruining your skin with that screen." She'd laughed.

She'd been a terrible sleeper her whole life, up until forty. Now she sleeps like the dead. She credits him with changing that. Now she thinks of him first thing every morning because of those nine words he said, over and over, for a year of nights.

She'd picked at the corner of her napkin while she said this. Torn a tiny piece off and rolled it between her fingers.

"It is so stupid," she said, swirling her glass. "Nine words."

But she married him. Nineteen years now. I remember looking at her across that wedding table and thinking: I will never have that. I will never find a man whose nine words save me, because I am the woman who deletes them. I am the woman who pretends not to need them. I am the woman who, two nights ago, typed "good night :)" with a smiley face that meant the opposite of what a smiley face is supposed to mean, and then deleted the whole thing and went to brush her teeth instead.

The testing never stops because the men never stop failing. Not because they are bad men. Because they don't know. Because no one taught them "I'm going to sleep" was a question. Because we, the women, have spent decades perfecting the art of saying one thing and meaning another, and now we are quietly furious, perpetually, miserably furious, that the men we love have not bothered to learn the cipher.

So we test. Again. Tomorrow night. And the night after that. We type the soft goodbye and we wait. We wait for the call, for the video, for the nine stupid words about not ruining our skin. We wait for the man who will refuse to let us disappear into the dark.

And some nights he does. And some nights he doesn't. And on the nights he doesn't, we lie there in the dark, fully awake, fully ruining our own mornings by being awake at 1am again, fully aware of exactly what we've just done.

I'm thirty-four now. I live alone. I sleep alone most nights. I have a man I am seeing, and he is kind, and he calls me when I say I am going to sleep, and he doesn't always say the right thing, and I don't always type the right thing, and we are both, in our own way, exhausted by the same tired dance we've been performing since we were old enough to know that love was something you had to pretend you didn't want in order to get it.

I don't know what the right answer is. I don't even know if there is one. I know that my phone is glowing right now, and I've typed "I'm going to sleep" three times and deleted it three times, and the cursor is blinking, and I am waiting, and I'm furious at him for not knowing, furious at myself for expecting him to guess without me ever saying the rules.

I'm going to send it now. The three words. The soft goodbye. The test.

I wonder if he'll fail.

I don't know if I'll hate him more, or me.

Probably me.

Edited for Word Garden by Wandering Mind