You are invited to my sleepover

“Bro, I said I was the bottom this time.”

I know we’re adults, with jobs and responsibilities and horrible things that happen when we eat curry, but do you want to come to my house for a sleepover?

It seems like the simplest way for us to become friends. It’s not easy making friends as an adult. When we were kids, someone in your class would simply come up to you and ask, “Want to have a sleepover?” Next thing you know you were eating some other family’s weird food and lying on a strange bedroom floor next to your new best friend.

Later in the night, you might be startled awake by a deep rumbling that you at first think is a monster but eventually realize is only your friend’s father snoring. And if you heard moaning, it had to be a ghost – please, God, let it be a ghost!

By morning, you and your friend had created lasting bonds. And some atrocious smells.

So why not as adults? Grab your toothbrush and your sleep apnea machine and come on over! Forget about taking weeks to discover our shared interests, values, blood pressure medications. Let’s get intimate on an inflatable mattress!

Not that kind of intimate; that’s a different kind of sleepover.

You should arrive by 5:00. Ideally, your spouse will drop you off. I don’t want you sneaking off in the night if things get too scary or political. But don’t worry, you can call her if you get lonely or forget your Amazon password.

First thing, I’ll want to show you my room. That’s where you’ll find my collections (bowl of loose change, unmatched socks), my games (really just Words with Friends on my iPhone), my investments (RRSPs, low risk).

Next we’ll talk sleeping arrangements. I’m sorry I don’t have a bunk bed. Wait! We’ll make a bunk bed! Nothing brings strangers together like working with their hands towards a single purpose so they can sleep together, stacked-up-wise.

Or we can just stick with the original air mattress plan. You start blowing up the air mattress while I find a pillow that doesn’t have too many drool stains. It could take a while. When I come back, I’ll take over on the air mattress until you stop seeing spots.

Then we’ll have supper. And our pills to help digest the supper. Don’t worry, it’s vegan, no-lactose, gluten-free. It’s a bag of chips and celery. I’ll be so excited about the sleepover I forgot to get groceries.

After supper, it’s play time, and by this I mean playing around on our phones, answering work emails and rage-scrolling through Twitter. We’ll look so adorable as we doze off in our chairs.

At 8 o’clock, it’s PJ time. You’ll call them “jee-bees,” which is either really cute or a sign of sudden cognitive decline. We’ll start Googling symptoms of dementia but will become distracted by a vintage Pat Benatar video, which will in turn send us down a rabbit hole of 80s nostalgia. One of us will make a dirty joke about “rabbit hole.” Bonding!

By 9 o’clock, it’ll be bedtime, not because it’s a sleepover but that’s just the way it is these days. We’ll brush our teeth, put in our night guard, more pills, have some water but not too much water because you know… Then it’s off to bed.

This is where the bonding really begins. In the dark, with your new friend, you can talk about anything, your hopes, your regrets, children, grandchildren, Pat Benatar. Talking is good, talking is healthy, talking is drowning out the sounds of digestion.

Eventually, we’ll fall asleep. We’ll wake up an hour later. We’ll stay awake. We’ll pee. (Warned you about the water…) We’ll drift off again. You’ll be startled awake by a deep rumbling – your own snoring. There will be moaning, and I apologize in advance.

In the morning, we’ll take our time getting up, mostly because the circulation has to return to our feet. By then, we’ll have bonded, we’ll have shared consciousnesses, we’ll have seen butts. There’s no going back from that. We’ll be fast friends.

So, what do you say? Sleepover?

What? Sorry, yes, officer, I do have my licence and registration…

 

My new novel, Smileyville, is now out and available through Amazon. (What isn’t?)