my bed
i LOVE it!
i started this forever ago when i was in this era of really LOVING stuff, but only recently got around to finishing it so the ending might not make sense because i have this thing where i can never remember where the fuck i was going with something, lol. it gets a bit sentimental so try not to throw up. also there are a lot of run-ons in here that i am too lazy to fix! sometimes you just have to have a run-on i think to get your point across. and as always, normal typo disclaimer.
In a poetry class I took in college (I would also stop reading here) my professor asked us to write a poem about our beds for an in-class exercise. At least, that’s how I remember it. Maybe she asked us to write a poem about a bed – “however you interpret that,” spoken in a very ominous creative writing professor voice, like she knew something we all didn’t. Maybe she meant we could write about any bed in any form, and maybe my memory edited it into an assignment asking me to write about my, me, Colleen’s bed, specifically. (Unrelatedly, I think that’s sort of my issue with writing and why I’m bad at fiction. I can only write about my bed. What do I know about anyone else’s?!)
I didn’t write anything profound in that exercise. Actually I don’t think I wrote anything at all. I imagine everyone else found something really creative to say about their bed, or a bed, or someone else’s bed (somewhat relatedly, I was tragically Not Fucking at the time), as I stared at a blank piece of college-ruled paper. But now, many years later, I have found something to say about my bed, and it is not new or creative or original, but it is that: I LOVE IT!
I bought my bed for $40 two years ago, off the person whose place I was taking in my current house. It’s worn a few different comforters, the first two ruined by stains and rips from three different cats. Right now, it has a quilt just light enough to keep me cool in the summer and just heavy enough to keep me warm in the winter. A blanket hangs around the foot, mostly used for naps or afternoon TV watching.
My bed houses a total of six pillows: two for decoration and lounging that I remove when I’m ready to go to sleep, but that prop my back up comfortably when I’m sitting on my laptop, and two that live beneath the two Sleeping Pillows, for added volume. I really only use one of the two Sleeping Pillows, prone to staying on the left side of the bed at night. Among the pillows, I also have a teddy bear that I got when I was nine, and a weighted stuffed dinosaur I got when I was 24. They each serve different purposes. The dinosaur sits on my chest when I’m watching a show or staring at my broken ceiling light. But it’s too cumbersome to hold for sleep, and the bear, quite gaunt and tattered at this stage of his life, fits perfectly in the space I’ve carved for it over the past decade-plus, squished between my armpit and my chin, when I’m ready to sleep. Those are all of the things on my bed.
If you plotted the amount of love I have for my bed and the amount of time spent in my bed on a graph, the lines wouldn’t run parallel in a positive correlation (math!), but they wouldn’t really be inversely related, either. If I spend all day in my bed, I sort of start to hate my bed and the color of my walls and the way the sun aggressively pokes through the broken slots of my blinds, even though sometimes I fantasize – only when I’m not in my bed – about spending my entire day in it. And I don’t always, or even usually, pick staying in my bed over Going Out and drinking and eating and talking to other humans and living a big exciting life. But after I’ve Gone Out and drank and ate and talked to other humans and let the world expand a little, there is no sensation I love more than slipping myself into my bed, or flopping myself on top of it, and letting my life return to a more normal, comfortable size.
What I’m explaining is probably just the relationship people have with a lot of good things, which is that if you have too much of it, it won’t be a good thing anymore. What’s special about my bed, though, is I don’t know if I can name something else that after I’ve gone without it, I would want more than I’d want my bed, or something that would make me feel like I’m exploding and floating at the same time once we’re reunited.
I could probably go a whole year without a lot of the pleasures that make the chemicals in our brain dance around, like eating an ice cream cone or drinking alcohol or buying something dumb online, and I would probably miss those things and think about them a lot. Appetites, unfortunately, seem to metastasize and consume more of the brain the more you try to ignore them. Ironic!
If I, say, ate an ice cream cone after 365 days without one, I’m sure it would be lovely and delicious and delightful. I’m sure my mouth would have an absolute party, and I’d probably make a weird groan and go “mmmm” before declaring that “I LOVE ice cream cones, and I never want to go without one for that long again!” to my fellow ice-cream eaters. But that reunion, between me and an ice cream cone, or me and a glass of wine, or me and an overpriced sweater, would pale — both in shape and scale — to the feeling I’d get returning to bed after even just one long day away from it.
When I flopped back onto my bed after My Mega Life Changing Trip To Europe, stinky and sweaty and covered in the dirt of two plane rides, one ham and cheese sandwich, and a BWI bathroom (I am not a No Outside Clothes On The Bed person) I think some of my body actually melted for a minute, as if the little cell receptors on my skin peeled off to sniff around my quilt and pillows and stuffed animals, and then crawled back up to my brain to transmit the message: “look, comfort! we’re back! it’s safe!”
This same experience happens when I come home from work, or a protracted excursion to Trader Joe’s, or a social gathering that required makeup, a shower, and a lot of standing. Physically, I feel very light — not in a Gross Body Way, but in a Nothing Hard Or Heavy Can Touch This Body Way — and emotionally, I feel very warm, as if the walls of my brain are made of sherpa. Mostly, I love that I am alone again on my little $40 cloud of fabric and springs, and I love that I can trust the outside world to be there when I want to return to it in a few hours. Getting in bed is easily in my top five favorite feelings ever.
What’s nice is that when I was younger and dramatic and sad for no reason (narrator: there were obviously some reasons), I would wake up counting down the hours until I saw my bed again – not because I loved it, but because if I was in it, it meant the day was over. I had done the whole existing thing, which in my younger and dramatic and sad-for-some-reasons days was very excrutiating, and I could now slink back into my place of non-existence. My bed, when I was younger and dramatic and sad for some reasons, wasn’t a thing I wanted to return to after letting my life get a little bigger, but more like a place — not in the physical sense but in the Being sense — where eveything was contained and blank and stuck in a pretty boring and miserable sameness. Maybe that’s why I had nothing to say about it when my professor asked us to write about our beds! My bed was just the non-thing that let me be a non-being non-thing whenever I got into it.
Now that I am older, and maybe still just as dramatic (evidence: this post) but certainly not as sad, my bed feels more like a thing and a place at the same time, and both are a part of that whole Existing project, which I don’t think I’d describe as excrutiating anymore. Whenever I spend too much of the day in my bed and start to hate it, it’s likely because I know I’m missing out on the sensations of existing that are somewhat necessary, if not fun. Maybe they are not warm and sherpa-esque like my bed, but maybe they are hot and cold, or Velcro-adjacent — things like eating a baguette and seeing other humans and feeling outside air on your face, that fill out small but probably important corners of life. And whenever I miss my bed a lot, I know it’s probably because I’ve had enough of the air on my face, and my little receptors need to sniff my pillows and my weighted dinosaur again, and let my body know it’s time to deflate.
I think maybe having just the right amout of the thing is what makes it a good thing — at least in the case of my bed and the time I spend in it. I LOVE my bed because now I exist enough outside of it to know what it’s like to miss it and its comforts. The return to it is celebratory, and sweeter and lighter, when existing isn’t so heavy. And when existing does inevitably get heavier (because existing always fluctuates in weight like that) I can trust that I will be, on the whole, fine and okay when I’m ready to leave my bed again.
(And obbbbviouslyyyy, I wrote this from my bed!)