I should be hap­py. Or feel­ing bit­ter­sweet, at least. On the one hand, I’m thank­ful to have had the chance to share so many things with her:

• lis­ten­ing to Bring Me The Disco King (Lohner Remix), as she sat curled in my lap in the dark­ness of my room
• runs for bub­ble tea before set­tling in for the night with a movie or two
• a road trip to Toronto, where I got to intro­duce her to my friends, Pacific Mall, and drag­on’s beard can­dy
• par­ties at Pat and Jen’s, with board games, Rock Band, deli­cious food, amaz­ing peo­ple, and gen­er­al silli­ness
• moments like this
• look­ing into her eyes while our bod­ies were locked in blan­kets on the liv­ing room floor
• read­ing my favourite parts of The Prophet to her
• just the two of us going to dim sum on a beau­ti­ful Saturday morn­ing, and intro­duc­ing her to a med­ley of new dish­es

But there’s one thing I regret, and that’s not being able to spend the night with her, for she had nev­er slept over, you see. Sure, there were times when we stayed awake well past sun­rise, with only the touch of hand and flesh as silent dia­logue, my desire to pro­long the plea­sure dri­ving my will to stay awake to every moment pos­si­ble with her. Those are some of my favourite mem­o­ries. But the sleep that even­tu­al­ly took us was only our bod­ies pass­ing out briefly from exhaus­tion, and when we woke, she’d be gone soon after.

There are oth­er things I wish I had had the chance to do while it last­ed — shar­ing a relax­ing bath, pho­tog­ra­phy and video ideas, get­ting involved in a deep co-op game — but none of them were as impor­tant as a night spent sleep­ing togeth­er.

A long time ago, I wrote about how a girl­friend helped me fig­ure out the impor­tance of the night because of my ear­li­er romances, and the sit­u­a­tions that nev­er let me share some­thing as sim­ple as sleep, the most inti­mate of inti­mates.

In a rela­tion­ship, shar­ing the night is more impor­tant than shar­ing flu­ids. Falling asleep with some­one is an accep­tance of trust, a way of say­ing that we’re com­fort­able enough to drift into our sub­con­scious minds.

Perhaps it was my fault for keep­ing her awake. I won­der now, if on one night, I should have let myself sleep, instead of let­ting our pas­sion take us long into the next day.