In Bed

It was summer and the claustrophobic air of the room and the pit of unnamed anxieties at the bottom of my stomach gave a feeling of timelessness and nothingness and immenseness and I was listless and lying on the rough carpeted floor of my bedroom, once my mother’s bedroom and once my bedroom before that and once the bedroom of a woman who neither of us knew but who left her breast cancer treatment directions in the snap pea green bathroom across the hall.  My naked body was sweating against the old carpeted floor.  I was twenty one, almost twenty two, but I could have been thirteen all over again; I could have been ageless.  Listlessness was floating all around me, ever existing in the heavy, humid summer air of my childhood home.

It was September.  Pale yellow light spilled through the blinds from the city streets onto the two of us as we sat on your white cloud bed, our foreheads resting against each other.  We were just breathing and breathing in the soft halo of light.  And then you said, “This is heaven.”  And then you said, “I love you.”

It was the beginning and I was spilling myself on you. Sweat and wetness, warm and coming forth into crevasses, both mine and yours, and onto bed sheets that were yours but that you soon began calling ours.  Late at night I spilled my soul, secrets and shame and hope all a fluid sound in the dark.  In the morning I spilled my make-up on your bed, the colors of my face spotting the white of your blanket.  Stains that I hoped you wouldn’t want to wash away.

It is summer.  The claustrophobic air of my new room and the same pit of anxieties at the bottom of my stomach render me sleepless and I lie the night away, telling myself the same stories I told myself when I was thirteen or twenty one.  Stories about love and a comfort that is better than the best bed.  My naked body sweats against my sheets.  I am aged and I am less.  Listlessness floats and so do I, in the time between heavens.