Moments Vol. 2

Or really, a love letter to my husband.

Photo: AJ Tamari

For the two weeks leading up to my period, my sleep becomes torturous. Despite bleeding like clockwork every month, something is clearly off — I get the insomnia of a pregnant or menopausal woman and my body temperature swells. When I put the thermometer to my belly during this time (a silly thing my husband and I started doing and turned into a ritual), it’s always over 100 degrees.

Hormone tests, like much of what’s available for decoding women’s health, reveal nothing. “Things look great!” the doctors say.

This month has been particularly bad. Every night, I wake up to pee and can’t fall back asleep, feeling as if someone has injected me with caffeine just as my eyes open. I’ve tried drinking less water and adding salt to my water because the biohackers suggest it, but nothing makes a difference. As someone who once didn’t sleep for over six months, weeks like these terrify me—I never want to go back there.

One recent morning (or really the sliver of dead time between night and day), I woke up at 2 am and tossed and turned for hours, growing increasingly frustrated that my body was betraying me again. There are worse things, a few of which I’m also living, but being unable to sleep is definitely a top torture. Finally, around 5 am, I woke up B in tears. My husband the all-time sleeper, the man who can fall asleep on cue and who sleeps for 10 hours on average.

After weeks of not sleeping well—the metallic icing on top of living in pain—I couldn’t bear to be alone with it anymore. The hours of restless darkness felt like they were swallowing me whole, eating away at the edges of my sanity. B showed no annoyance at being woken up much sooner than he would’ve liked, he looked at me gently, wiped my tears with his thumb, and nuzzled me into his neck as I cried.

When my stomach grumbled (my circadian rhythm deeply confused) he made us both toast with butter and jam and we sat there eating it in our underwear in bed. Suddenly everything felt lighter, even fun, like we were two kids getting away with something. Eventually, we sunk back into bed, B’s hand touching my stomach to reassure me, like a pacifier. In a few minutes, I was asleep.

*

Two weeks ago the pain felt 10% less awful and I was itching to get out, to go to the places you could once always find us. That meant Brooklyn Heights, where we fell in love.

It was rush hour and the subway was packed, with no handlebar space remaining. B leaned against the door between train cars and held me tightly at the waist, a determined look on his face not of a lover but an army sergeant perfecting a drill. He knows instinctively that any sudden jerk of the train just fires up my nerve pain, that seemingly minor jolts ricochet deep inside me. Without my asking, he set us up to avoid that.

I put my arms on his shoulders to steady myself and we swayed with the train as if we were one body, back and forth and back and forth. It felt like a dance. What wasn’t on the surface a romantic gesture but more one of survival suddenly transported us back to the early days, when everything each of us did was a thrill. I caught myself beaming in his sunglasses and he was beaming back, the two of us giddy at this simple act of love and care, the way it took us back to a time before pain intruded.

I wondered to myself if people would find this suddenly intimate moment obnoxious, never wanting to be that couple on the train. But when I looked around everyone was smiling at us, like they could see what we were feeling, like they could feel it, too.