I no longer sleep at House of the Future. Our lease is up at the end of the month and given the changes in our personal and financial situations (among them, Jenn being six months pregnant), we elected not to renew the lease, much to the dismay of V. the Russian Landlord.
For eleven months, I slept in an old closet at House of the Future, surrounded by garlands of plastic ivy, fake pearls, and permanent icicles, gauzy curtains, and red and clear Christmas lights. The fairy bordello, Daniel called it the first time he slept there, nailing my aesthetic intentions.
Now I sleep on the other side of the city in Maison Temporaire. This old neighborhood has many houses for sale, with brightly painted doors and lilies in the front yard, but only one has a Frippy watering its lawn and protecting its copper wiring. It’s only a two-bedroom house, but me and my meager possessions fit inside it like a marble in a shoebox. I rattle through this house, loose, disoriented when I climb the spiraling stairway to the second floor. But I can’t get too comfortable, anyhow.
Perhaps this is why I can’t sleep. I’ve tried lowering the temperature at night, program the thermostat to drop a few degrees after midnight, keep a fan in the open window. Maybe the sounds of cars on the freeway keep me up — it sounds like an awful lot of traffic for 3 am. Who are these people? Where are they going? Don’t they need to sleep, too? I try relaxation techniques, slowly tensing and releasing my muscles, counting my breaths. I check the clock on my phone. 3:58 AM.
And then I put on his music and I can do it, I can sleep.
I’ve dated musicians before. None of them were terrible, but this is a first, where it’s the sounds I like independent of the source. Even if I didn’t know him, I would reach for it to sleep to, stacked among a few sleeping-hour cds, a crackly Autechre album, Mira Calix’s gentle discord, the Lynch soundtracks of Beach House, music that can be turned down low and still be effective in creating a safe space in which I can rest. His sounds float over the white noise of the window fan, of wet tires on the interstate, complemented by the electric buzz of the occasional cicada.
Okay, I can’t be entirely impartial. When I’m finally at ease, breathing deeply, gently transitioning into a dream, there’s his voice, the same voice that calls me bunny when I nod off in his embrace.
Perhaps this is why I can sleep, because I’m reminded of a space where I can get as comfortable as I’d like.
…
(The image, by the way, is a painting I made Daniel for his birthday. I tried to see what happened if I put together bunnies and my abstract work and was very pleased. I’ve never done a lop-eared nubby bunny before, but in this case, I couldn’t imagine painting anything else. Jenn saw it and said she thought it was my best work to date. I told her that if I just fall in love with everyone who commissions a piece from me, I’d produce an awesome body of work.)
