After a Thousand Counted Sheep, I Tried Something Else

My surname is Shen, and my given name, Mian (alias), means sleep — which is ironic, because sleep is the thing I do worst.Melatonin, white noise, bedtime yoga, the phone locked in a drawer, I tried them all, on time.. At its worst I lay watching the ceiling go from black to grey. A friend forwarded me the late-night page: go — let your body be talked to sleep first. Late-night places are the scarcest of all; my application waited in review while I lay awake, equal parts anxious and hopeful. The night the approval came through and the address was sent to my phone alone, I did not sleep either — but for the first time, I felt that somewhere before dawn, a place was waiting for me.

Los Angeles is quiet at that hour. When I arrived, the slippers were already by the door and the light was kept at its lowest setting. My shoes were taken away, warm tea placed in my palms, every voice pressed soft, as if afraid of waking something. I changed without doing a thing; the robe was warmed. The bath was attended throughout, steam laced with a faint woody scent, and standing in the warm water I felt the jaw I had clenched all day loosen first. To be thought of in advance, and served this gently, when you have spent years duelling a ceiling alone — it nearly made me cry before anything had even begun.

Lying down, the warmth arrived first at my scalp and the back of my neck, like someone lowering, one by one, the buzzing switches in my head. Then the warm, silky Nuru liquid spread slowly over my skin — from shoulders and back to waist, along the insides of my arms to my calves, smooth and steady, slower even than the day sessions. My breathing was ragged at first; I counted it and lost the count. My fingertips tingled, then my whole arm sank. By the time my feet and toes were wrapped in the same warmth, one thought crossed my mind: to be cared for whole, from scalp to toes, is to be put back together into one piece. Somewhere in the second half I powered down — no struggle, no sheep. Consciousness receded like a tide going out on its own.

My last memory before sleep is the private care passage. It was the part I had feared most — afraid of embarrassment, afraid it would wake me further. I said my terms first: stoppable at any time, and if we stop, we simply do something else. The confirmation was barely louder than a murmur. Warmth and patience approached slowly, never hurrying, coaxing me out of my tension inch by inch. Half dreaming, I thought: being opened does not have to take force, and being cherished does not have to be a performance. That shyness melting into safety was the last breeze that carried me into sleep. When I woke, my mouth was dry — and a warm drink was already waiting for me in the rest area, kept hot.

the closer the night, the clearer the mind, which behaves like a machine that cannot be switched off, replaying every wrong sentence of the day at full volume.. That night, for the first time, my body talked my mind down — the warmth at my back first, then the heaviness in my arms, then my eyelids descending on their own; the thoughts were not chased away, they were coaxed back, layer by layer, by temperature. I surfaced once, briefly: nothing in the room but very low music and even breathing, and the warmth still lying steady across my shoulders, as if someone were standing guard over my sleep, refusing entry to every idea. I turned over and sank again. It has been years since I was guarded into sleep like that. When I was a small child, ill in bed, my mother's hand rested on my forehead. It had exactly this temperature.

On the drive home I didn't turn on music. The sleepiness felt old and natural, the kind from childhood after playing hard all day. The late-night session is a weekly fixture now. I simply, finally, have a place that can lead me back to sleep. Once, before a work trip to Las Vegas, I booked the travelling ritual ahead as well — and in a hotel room in a strange city, the same low lamp and the same warmth were waiting. That night, too, I slept deeply.

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