So for some proverbial shits and giggles, I give you a rarely-seen-recently insight into some physiological/psychiatric info about me, a piece of Kristen that is known only to my nearest and dearest because, frankly, it's fucking embarrassing. And yet somehow hilarious....
In my late twenties/early thirties, I lived primarily with my younger sister. She was, hands-down, the best roommate I've ever had; she'll say the same of me, and neither of us could tell you the reason. Sorority notwithstanding -- because we weren't close growing up, to be sure -- it somehow just worked, a symbiosis that one usually encounters in romance novels and is almost always entirely fictional. Our harmony was so perfect that I swore off non-marital cohabitation for good after her, and my heart can still break a little when I think that we may never live together again.
How we came to live together was not an intended event, nor was it a particularly happy beginning: I was in the throes of one of my countless flares of major depression, I was dating a hateful and abusive guy with whom I'd briefly lived but who was so violent that I voluntarily went home to live with my mother and my stepfather and our relationship, to put it lightly, was not a good one. One evening, for reasons I cannot recall, my mother and I began arguing and it escalated quickly into a physical row: She hit me with her fists, spit at me and scratched me with her nails; I tore to shreds the only remaining portrait of my original family and broke a small end table on the wall next to her head. I'm sad to say that this type of fighting was familiar to us and that without intervention, we would probably have retreated, eventually, to our respective corners to lick our wounds and reassemble our dignities in preparation for the next round. There was always a next round.
My sister accidentally saw to it that there would never be a next round. Happening in on the tail end of the battle, stopping by on her way home from work, she intuitively stepped between us and put a stop to the violence with stern words and hands. She ordered our mother out of the room and firmly directed me to pack my things, we were leaving. What we could not carry we would return for the next day. I was going home with her. I blindly assembled a duffel of various and sundry items, necessities and not, and nervously followed her in my car to her rented condo roughly five miles from our family's home. In the days and weeks that followed, my possessions made their gradual way into the shared space, our groceries mingled along with our vastly different tastes in music, television and cultural covenants. It quickly became natural, it gradually became all-important and at times it would be life-saving. I don't know, all cliche intended, how I might have survived those years without her. I don't even like to ponder it, really.
My sister is a creature of routine, a follower of rules, a by-the-book practitioner of practicality and, if she were so inclined, could swiftly and deftly author an international best-selling book on logic and reason. Witty, dry and full of pragmatic skepticism, she is all that I wish I were but without the mind-bending bouts of mental illness and the genetic disposition for self-destruction. Although I am nearly five years her senior, I am the cosmic younger sister, she's the teacher and I worried, briefly, that my reflexive oddities would infringe too sharply upon her manicured life. I was certain, on that first evening, that she would quickly realize her grave error in inviting me into her home and that my stay would be another temporary one, that I'd soon be searching for yet another place to store my things. It only took one profoundly odd incident to assure me that I couldn't have been more wrong.
I am a somnambulist of the worst order: I'm the one from whom the keys should be hidden at bed time, I'm the one who should lock the fridge and cabinets before bedding down, I'm the one who will frighten and amaze you with my bizarre and lucid behavior that occurs during the soundest of sleeps. I've done it my whole life, and as a child I did not remember my sleep-walking and was alternately terrified and fascinated when incidents were recounted to me by my parents: Like Damian or Regan, I would eerily rise from my bed, once taking a whole shower, ironing my clothes, blowing my hair dry and applying a full face of makeup at 2am only to be discovered by my mother before leaving the house for "school, I'm going to school." I do not remember this and my stomach turns a little telling a story of myself that I do not recall. Mostly, I am a sleep-eater; that is, I will rise while sleeping and eat anything and everything, from cookies to sticks of butter to raw bacon to sour apple juice. I usually do not remember doing it and am reminded of my long bouts of NS-RED by opening mouth to the mirror, exposing my 17 cavities and four root canals resulting from my disorder.
Within days of moving in with my sister, I had what was probably a stress-induced flare of nighttime antics, evidenced by crumbs in the bed and bags under my eyes and the sour taste of half-chewed food in my morning mouth. One day, upon returning from work, I sat down on my bed and glanced over at my nightstand only to see something that brought back the thrilling terror of the bigger incidents: A green, eucalyptus-scented pillar candle stood lopsided on its saucer with large bites taken out of it, like an apple. I shouted and laughed and my sister came running into the room, curious about the noise. I realized that she did not know this about me and I hesitated, nervously, before explaining what had happened: I had, in my sleep, taken a bite from the candle and immediately realized, "this isn't food," and spit it into the wastebasket -- then I took another bite. She looked at me with what I read as intense curiosity and I was anxious, I worried that she would find this behavior intolerable, weird, potentially worrisome to a point of concern but she surprised me by laughing -- hard.
It was not amusing when, in our next apartment together, I lit a cigarette in my sleep and burned a large hole through my down comforter straight to the fitted sheet below. It was at this time that she started confiscating my cigarettes before bed. I happily complied.
The night before last, without any explanation more guess-worthy than "perhaps it was the barometric pressure," I rose in my sleep, squatted next to the bed, and urinated on the rug. Marc reports an initial shock, a complete incomprehension of what could be happening until I spoke, very clearly as if I were awake, and told him, "it's cool." Like my sister would have done if she'd been witness, he quietly retrieved towels from the hall closet to soak up the moisture, placed a hand on my back to comfort me and help me maintain my balance and observed in awe my retreat to the bathroom and my return to bed and continued slumber. It was only in the morning, when Fergus asked, "why is the rug rolled up?" that I was shocked into memory, detailed and mortifying, and asked, "did I pee on the rug last night?" to which Marc replied in the affirmative. Like with my sister a decade before, I was anxious and ashamed. But like my sister a decade before, he laughed -- hard.
I rose from bed almost immediately and naturally, I phoned my sister.
