Whether or not I can deal with sleeping with another person depends on the person, the way they occupy space. It has nothing to do with my feelings for them or how attached I am to them. I say "person" when of course I mean "man." I could never sleep with a woman as a regular thing, even chastely. Or rather I could but why should I? On the spectrum of human sexuality I fall rather decisively in the strictly-homosexual zone. This is not ideal but what can I do? We can't all be erotically omnivorous bisexuals, someone has to stake out the lonely frontiers of the Kinsey scale. To be in the intimate presence of a male body is always at the very least interesting to me in some fundamental way, triggering a certain level of heightened physical alertness in me which the presence of a female body simply doesn't inspire. To share a bed with a woman would constitute a simple annoyance and nothing more. I would be needlessly adjacent to a heat-producing mammal, a source of distracting noises and irksome mattress tremors. I'd sooner cuddle a large dog, frankly. Or one of those big sofa cushions. Is that hostile?

Anyway, so whether or not I can share a man's bed depends on how much he moves around, shifts, fidgets, kicks, jabs, elbows, and so on, and of course whether he snores, snorts, squawks, gulps, whistles, talks in his sleep, etc. I'm a notoriously light sleeper, the smallest disturbance wakes me. When my cat yawns in the hallway I'm liable to bolt upright. M was my ideal bed partner, small and silent and motionless, plus he was really, really cute when he slept, an adorable corpse, so when I couldn't get to sleep I could always gaze at him for a while and be both charmed and soothed, not to mention grateful for the opportunity to work out those silly necrophiliac urges of mine. D was surprisingly nice to sleep with, despite his gangly limbs and soaring, pointless height. I didn't think it would work out but he surprised me. He "slept small" as it were, folding himself into a pleasingly compact personal space. Too bad we were so imcompatible when awake. My first J and I couldn't sleep together and almost always had separate beds, even separate rooms, eventually separate states. My next J and I slept together and it was kinda touch and go. He uses his fist for a pillow, which is cuter than it probably sounds.

When I was little I slept with a teddy bear named Brownie, which was given to me the day I was born. I still have him, but sleeping with him just doesn't do it for me anymore, who knows why. Maybe it's the mildew. Sure he's male (why do I think that?), and cute, or used to be anyway, before he let his appearance go straight to hell, and doesn't wake me up with a lot of movement or snoring, but I dunno, he's not too responsive, and the torn ear is a little disconcerting.