this morning, I woke up thinking my bed was a magic cloud and that I should really only leave it for things like bike rides and trips to foreign countries.
and then I remembered when we first moved back here from portland, how we did not actually have a bed. that, in the throes of moving (and in a moment of blind optimism), we ditched our old one in hopes it might force the mattress gods to smile down on us. but there was no smiling and for months, we slept on an old air mattress, one with multiple tiny holes in it. what this meant, dear reader, is that it had to be re-inflated two or three times during the night, and that most times we woke up millimeters from the floor, felt our backs and hips and shoulders press into what were surely hateful plywood planks beneath renters beige carpet. and so then ward would reach over in the dark, in that drunken sleepy clumsy way I will always remember, to plug the air pump back in. we'd hear the high-pitched whir of electric air and feel our bodies slowly rise upwards, as if supernatural forces were at play. in the wee dark hours of the night I thought, someday we will laugh about this. not now, but someday. but it went on like this for months-- the two of us and that ridiculous situation, every night, with netflix and bowls of cereal and the slow hiss of the mattress, the sound of air slowly escaping, our bodies gradually sinking, ultimately rolling in towards each other.
but someday is finally now and I am in my magic cloud bed and I am laughing, nary an air pump in sight.
