6/27/2025

Sleeping Together: How queer love helped diagnose my narcolepsy

I was recently given the honor of participating in a variety show celebrating Queer Joy. I intended to perform a suite of love poems that I’d already prepared, but after reading (again) the part of Inferno where Dante encounters the lustful, and is so overcome with grief that he faints. As stomach-turningly pretentious as it is to be inspired to write by Dante, I couldn’t help myself. I abandoned my plans and wrote this piece about sleep disorders and the healing power of queer love.

Enjoy!

ps. Music for the piece was composed and recorded by Mykal Alder June, a phenomenal trans musician and writer here in Atlanta. You can find more of her music at her bandcamp.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

Is anything as embarrassing as falling asleep? There’s always this strange timidity to it. Whenever we hit that paradoxical drift and cliff of the world turning black and our brains just going away, it’s right there. The body becomes a vanishing cabinet, and poof, we disappear into our flesh. Dead weight. Body blankets. Sandman sandbags.

There’s no fanfare, no final bow. We are turning over the theatre to its audience of ghostlights. It’s vulnerable. It’s mortifying. Especially if you, like me, occasionally snore.

Especially if you, like me, fall asleep right before, right after, or occasionally during sex. A lot. More times than I care to admit I have literally been in someone’s mouth, leaned back, closed my eyes, and woke up to the cocked-head confusion of my lover holding me like a microphone at a press conference and asking the all-too-familiar question: “Uh…babe?”

And what can I do? How do I excuse the wandering child of my mind, slipping my hand in the supermarket and drooling in the bread aisle? Most of the time I laugh, I look guilty, I say it’s not their fault, or blame work or the weight of the world and most of the time this is enough. I yawn. I stretch. I rally and, with apologetic eyes and sure hands, I make up for lost time. And so it goes.

And so it went until one day, when my long distance girlfriend visited for the first time and in our first tender touches, it happened. Again. This aubergine shame ballet. Her mouth. My drifting body. My ink and come-to. Her incredulous smile. My nervous and trembling wait for the moment I, again, must explain this strange and unforgivable quirk and she says it.

“Oh, sure. You have cataplexy. My ex had that.”

And suddenly it was there proud as a patch on a Girl Scout sash. I wasn’t a disaster or disappointing. I was diagnosed. I had a thread to follow, a spindle to the exit. This impossibly cool punk rock Ariadne had given me a way out of the labyrinth. No more bullshit. Not only did I have something, but someone else had it, too. Someone worthy of her love, if only briefly. And so I looked it up. Turns out it’s not quite cataplexy, but I have it narrowed down to two:

Either I have a rare form of narcolepsy called vasovagal syncope or I have a rare form of cataplexy called orgasmolepsy. Either sex short circuits my vagus nerve until the feeling pulls me under, or the intensity of sex suddenly makes me lose so much muscle tone that I’m awake, but briefly catatonic. Either way, fucking is so much sometimes that my body shuts down until I come gasping back to the world minutes later.

Once my condition had a name, I felt a wave of euphoria. I faint because love is too much. I am a Bridgerton plotline. A Jane Austen stuntwoman. I am a corseted hypoxia. I am swoon and sudden rush. I am blush and oblivion. I am fanning myself with the vapors like a fine Southern Belle, all weak ankles and only your arms can save my fine china face from the floor. Catch me, carry me across the threshold, put me back in the cabinet with all the other beautiful, breakable things. I am every woman’s secret dream: a romantic cliche.

And how appropriate this woman was the one to name it. How appropriate for this girl off of Grindr to know me like this. This is what Queer love is all about. We drift through the world impossibly alone, always looking down until our eyes touch a pair of scuffed Doc Martens and a woman brighter than the sun takes our hand and whispers “me, too.”

We all feel so alone until we don’t, don’t we? We all feel so zoo animal and freak show, so singularly weird and broken until we meet each other. Until she likes the same music, until they’re wearing a T-shirt of that one movie you love. Until it asks you to punch it in the stomach as hard as you can. Until he kisses you and begs you not to hold back this time.

I once told a cis woman I couldn’t hook up with her anymore because my body was changing in ways that frightened me. I once told a girlfriend that I needed sex to be a little more forceful, that I needed to be taken, like a fussy child to the pool.

I would have fun once I was pushed in.

She smiled like she could already feel the water at her waist.

To be known is to be loved. To be othered with one another is all we can hope for. Tie me up. Spit in my mouth. Wait for me to put on my fursuit. We meet each other in such strange and beautiful places. We make eye contact in candlelight waiting for the wax to get hot enough to mean something.

I told my girlfriend that, sometimes, I fall asleep during sex. She gave it a name. She held me. She leaned me back onto the bed and asked me with stars in her eyes:

“Can I still touch you…after you’re asleep? I’m…kind of into that.”

We find each other, don’t we? Questions and answers, calls and responses, songs and choruses. Swapping our dark idiosyncrasies like every night is Christmas morning. She knows I fall asleep. She’s into that.

God. Isn’t it hot? Isn’t it all so enormous?

Someone wake me up.

I’m falling in love.