THE BED

I suspect you’ve been there, so you know how it goes: you have a fight and before long one of you is in the other room, splayed on a couch, scrunched on a futon, sometimes even curled into a fetal ball on the new hardwood floors.  This time it was me.  She’d not been well and the illness wouldn’t resolve itself and the doctors couldn’t fix it.  At first, I thought it was a temporary exile and that eventually, I'd be back in our room and sleeping in our shared bed but, somewhere along the line, as each day ended and its struggles became nothing but a hazy memory, "temporary" turned into four years ago.

One day recently I just moved into the office.  In the other other room (our bedroom together), she said she was still hurting; said she didn’t want to bother me; said she didn’t want to wake me up in the middle of the night with her pain and insomnia.  Maybe that was true, but even though I didn’t know it, that’s when the fire started to go out.  But after so long in the living room, I finally cleaned out the office bookcase, threw away some files, tossed my jeans and shirts in an old box, and edged a shitty old mattress in the corner.  It’s not too bad.  There’s a CD player, an easy chair, and a ancient desktop computer that I can use whenever I want.

Last month, though, I bought a bed.  An actual bed.  I went to a department store, picked out a new mattress and box spring, had it delivered last Wednesday.  It’s comfortable enough. I bought two sets of sheets--navy blue and black--to swap out after each one goes through the laundry.  There’s only room for me as it turns out but, as each year passes, I see more clearly how that will be enough.  Eventually, I suspect my bed in the office will eventually turn into my own, one-bedroom apartment near the Interstate.

I used to say we can fix it.  I used to say it isn’t over.  I used to say a lot of things.

What I would say now, though--I mean, if she asked, and she won’t--is this:  do you remember when we met twenty years ago, how my twin bed was shoved up against the wall, how I was profoundly lonely, how I did intense, passionate things to myself in the quiet dark just to simulate the intimacy that sometimes happens between two people?  Do you remember that?

I’m sorry; did I saw twenty years ago?

I meant last night.   DFP