You Up? — One Angry Waitress

Some years ago, my mother cautioned me to never to get serious with a man who snored. I laughed off her words. At the time, I thought they were nothing more than a sleepless jab at my father, after a single night of poor rest.

Years passed, and we discovered that my father had sleep apnea. The affliction sometimes stopped his breathing in the night and left him to come to gasping. The old boy was given a machine, one that he liked to fight, by bubbles into it. The noise of this was worse than the snoring or the choking, and suddenly it was both my mother and I awake in the night, playing cards in the hallway. Meanwhile, my father slept on, oblivious.

“What happens if we unplug it?” I asked once, after a string of particularly bad nights.

“Possible brain damage,” my mother said, squinting at her cards in the dim light.

“Well, chances are that’s already happened… so what’s one more night?”

She gave me a long look.

“No,” she said at last.

Then, presumably, though I cannot remember for sure, she handed me my ass at King in the Corner.

When I moved out, all was suddenly quiet. I could hear myself think again. In the silent evenings, I began to read folklore. I came across a Slavic nightmare spirit that feeds on the sleeping, taking away their lifeforce, leaving bad dreams in its place. And within a few years, I found myself living with my own version of this malevolent divinity. A tall, dark-haired man who snored in my face. As I lay awake, I felt my own lifeforce slowly ebbing away with each look at the clock. When I did sleep, I dreamed of explosions and fires, his snores a realistic soundtrack of blasts and crackling that permeated the thin membrane of my slumber.

In the years following our meeting, I sometimes sleep in the spare room atop the too-soft mattress. When company visits, I don’t sleep at all. In hotels, I find myself closed into the bathroom, atop a makeshift bed of towels, while this beautiful dark-haired demon slumbers on, his mouth open, oblivious. It’s all very familiar.

Some years ago, my phone would buzz with evening text messages of, “You up?” Such a message might’ve culminated with a late date. But now, I get that very same message from girlfriends who, like me, have been woken by their partners, or have never gotten to sleep at all.

My friends and I talk about sleeping pills and CBD oil and the foods that might be keeping us awake—though we all know what the problem is. It lives and breathes, loudly, in the next room.

Now, some nights when the snoring is particularly terrible, I find myself calling my mother. Over Viber, we chat on camera into the night, our partners snoring on, as we pour more wine.

“You know,” I tell her, “you were right.”

She grins. She’s a white wine drinker, so her teeth are not purple like mine. “Oh?” she says, “and just what was I right about?”