It's cold tonight. As the weather has changed over the last few weeks, inching towards another fifty-degree California winter, I've started sleeping with a t-shirt on. As I was pulling my pajama pants on earlier I realized that I haven't slept naked in months. The only time I ever go to bed naked is when I'm sleeping with someone. I remember the first time I tried to sleep naked by myself. It was unsettling; I kept pulling against the sheets, trying to turn away. It was too much sensation to feel the cotton weave of the sheets muzzle against my bare skin.
When I was younger I struggled to fall asleep when sharing the bed with a woman. Being so close to another body, hearing their breath, smelling their skin, feeling their inhales nudge their round bellies against mine; it was sensory overload. I spent nights and nights lying besides women, wide awake. As I got older the foreignness of another body in bed next to me subsided. The persistent touch of the blunter parts of our bodies, the breath, the warm echo of old sex, it all became a comfort instead of a lingering alien encounter.
I've gotten into the habit of walking around my apartment naked in the mornings and on weekends. Almost the entire west wall in my apartment is a big sliding glass door with a tall window beside it. I always forget that most anything I do in my apartment is visible from the street until I walk to the dresser for a fresh pair of underpants and look down on all the people walking on the sidewalk.
Being naked in the daytime feels natural. It feels apt, like a precursor to something active, undoubtedly sexual. There's so much to distract in the daytime, the sounds from the street, the intensity of all the details the sunlight brings out, the subconscious urge to go out and be productive. Being naked and alone at night is scary to me. I like the idea that my nudity at night is tied to sex. Being naked with the night sky above, in an empty box stacked on top of dozens of other empty boxes, the loneliness is amplified.
The touch of the cold air and the rustled sheet aren't unsettling because of the nakedness, but because of their indifference to it. Shouldn't a thing that touches me so intimately have more of a purpose? Shouldn't there be more to say with all the waiting Hooksexup endings of my body than to lay limply across it in the dark?
I picked out t-shirt to match my green pajama bottoms tonight as I got ready for bed. It's cold, my toes are slowly drifting towards numbness padding around my hardwood floors. The air feels sharp and metallic against my bare arms. I pulled the t-shirt over my head and looked at myself in the closet mirror, happy to think that my pajamas match. Happy that they'll be a gentle buffer against my cruel sheets so that I'll be able to sleep tonight without having to think about the all the indifferent spaces between the threads.
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