The Bed

Extra Soft

She never thought it could feel like this here. Never thought this place could be not a mine, but an ours. Now the left side of the mattress is beginning to catch up in its compression, and she feels herself rise each time he comes to bed. Her head rests on the satin pillowcase she’s taken care to fill with the plushest pillow. His head lies just on the edge, his nose close enough to hear how silent his breathing is, his skin competing with the white linen for the purest hue of ivory. Eyelashes long and abundant, it’s a miracle he is able to lift his lids at all. He stirs. Bent at the knee, his leg tightens around her own. At dawn she swears the Sun grows fingers for the sole purpose of reaching through the blinds and enlacing them about these bare bodies and the cloud upon which they rest, melting them like glass and melding them into a singular entity. It becomes impossible to differentiate a her elbow from a his, a his leg from a her leg from a leg of the bed. The compression caused by each movement somehow echoing a sensation of contraction felt inside, the immobility of four legs finally understood. 

He is sticky against the white duvet but loves the feeling of her skin on his, so they will always live beneath the same number of layers. Sometimes in the morning she will wake to find the Indian quilt layered atop the duvet swatted off the bed like a pesky gnat, but perhaps more often he will awake in a sweat to find the AC unit — whose remote lives on her side of the bed — powered off. Now the linen always carries the slightest hint of must, and the window of time between washes makes itself known. 

Soft

She bought the bed at nineteen when moving into this old-school Upper West Side studio apartment. The woman who has been subletting it to her for the last two years, left much of her furniture, with the exception of the bed. You should buy your own bed, she had said, as though assuming the contrary were a thing reserved for only the most out of touch. So the young subletter took to researching mattresses, evaluating comfort through the reviews of others, feigning comprehension of various cooling technologies, remaining conscious of her hospitality worker’s budget. People have quite a bit to say about beds, there is no lack of individuals willing to state their case for which mattress produces the most successful slumber sessions. Apparently mattresses are measured on a scale from extra soft to extra firm. In terms of which is best, it’s mostly subjective, though the softer ones are known to be bad for the back, but in cases of side sleepers they are meant to be one of the better options. 

She had always wanted a soft mattress, one into which you could sink. It would be her first large adult purchase in a series of establishing her own life through materialism. Knowing that soft mattresses privilege the sleep of side-sleepers (a group of which she is member) made it all the more desirable. Since purchasing a soft mattress, it’s hard to say whether her sleep is any better or worse than it was with firmer counterparts, but there is no doubt that the mattress is comfortable. Everyone who has ever laid upon it has joined her in the struggle of emerging from its plush depths, including her mother who after regularly awakening from a fifteen-minute-turned-one-hour nap will remark, “it’s too soft!” 

The mattress is stained now, the consequence of two years worth of dozing off with a mug of tea nestled in her lap, as well as her attempts at keeping up during after hour drinks with older, more seasoned coworkers. Her attempts to clean these messes only created more lasting marks. As for the bedframe, it is modest, falling into the category of minimalist do-it-yourself style furniture. Because they were ordered from separate distributors, the segments of the bed arrived in pieces, and they did not arrive in time for her move. Her first night was spent on an overpriced inflatable mattress placed in direct contact with the ground, so that around three am she discovered that she was sharing it with a very large, very bold, cockroach who thought it appropriate to coo in her ear.   

Firm

In the winter the bed becomes keeper and aggressor. When the darkness begins closing in and all that’s dark inside mingles with the objective world, she wraps herself in throw blankets, raises the duvet over her head, transforming the bed into a bunker — defense against the apocalypse. But it’s impossible to truly escape a storm that emanates from within. Now trapped, sinking into the bed’s depths, does she become aware of her isolation, as the storm falls hard upon her. “All alone!” her full-sized bed taunts her.

She has, upon various occasions, tried to escape this solitude, finding her way like the cockroach into the beds of others. There was the bed of a man who nudged her no’s into neutrality. There is a limited number of times one can express their desire to sleep in a bed that is their own before growing weary, doubling back and beginning to dread the weight of the alone waiting at home. Better to withstand the strangeness of someone else’s chambers, lay atop their tabula to which her body has not conformed so that her head and shoulders are stoically perpendicular and the left side of her body seems to rub against the grain of silky cotton sheets rather than flow into it. Better to withstand this than to be smothered by the undertow where no one is around to pull you out. So she let herself lay on this bed, drying out like a sponge left on the ledge of the bathtub. 

There was the hotel bed with a man whose surname she did not know, on sheets who never got a chance to acquaint themselves with the bodies that slept, and rolled, and made love upon them. His beautifuls were as empty as the half filled pillows upon which they barely slept. What about the bed above the bar in an Upper East Side walk-up? Was it better that she threw herself repeatedly against the plank-like thing – creaking in the same manner as the first one upon which she ever did the act? No, these beds were just as lonely as her own, and she could not get beneath the covers and believe it possible to block out the darkness. 

Extra Firm

Her childhood bed was perhaps the firmest bed upon which she had slept. It wasn’t until she discovered, while spending the night on a neighbor’s mattress pad, that beds could melt you. Though her mother prefers firmer mattresses, she never meant for her daughter’s mattress to be a thing so stiff. At one point there was another mattress. She had splurged and purchased for her daughter – one with more give. But upon returning from a weekend with her father, the girl grew unexpectedly ill and in regurgitating all she had eaten, soiled the mattress. Her mother would speak often of the mattress, mostly with disdain towards the father for rendering her purchase obsolete, and though her daughter was too young to remember the comfort of the bed, the idea of the loss resonated with her. 

Despite its rigidity, the twin-sized bed served her well. For many years it kept the gaggle of dolls and stuffed animals at its foot level with her eyes at its head. It held both her and her mother on the many nights when shadows turned to monsters in the darkness. The bed lent itself to being transformed into other places and things, an ironing board in the mornings, a one room schoolhouse with which to play teacher, and later, a desk at which to be student in the wee hours of the morning. The bed had caught her tears and also bounced her back into her responsibilities. It was here that she reread books for the hundredth time and watched the same rotation of VHS tapes and DVDs, listened to the same rotation of her mother’s cassettes and vinyls before purchasing music on her first iPod. The trim of white orbs on the detailing of the headboard that can only be described as “princessy” gave her something to count in those moments when mindlessness became a necessity. Over time she watched as the white paint began to chip off the spheric trim, revealing the smooth waves of tawny wood beneath. The bed had raised her. The bed was home.