Bed
Shoes under the bed mean you’re staying. Hat on the bed is bad luck. Someone once said “she can leave crumbs in my bed any day” to mean they were smitten. I like sleeping on the floor. The easiest way to put my toddler to sleep is to let him fall asleep on top of me. I am a good bed.
Instinct is the feather. Intuition is the quill. If a princess can’t figure out that a stack of mattresses is a ridiculous test, thinks that’s normal, then she deserves to be booted from the kingdom. I for one welcome the pea.
I’ve spent 80% of the last two days in bed with with Covid-19 and because it’s the guest bed in my house, aka my mother’s bed, not my own bed, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes something mine.
I felt delirious. I think the virus briefly made me insane. I thought I could hear the light refracting on the walls and when my son’s garbage trucks were playing in the background while we slept, I could hear every single item of trash being crushed. I could have identified every object. I didn’t do anything very productive with this brief heightening of my senses, and I had no dreams. I wasn’t having a great time with this. My thoughts looked like cut grass waiting to be of use, though the lawn now looked healthy and kept. I was insane because I forgot everything, but one thing.
Recollection was in this way highly specific to both the individual and occasion, impossible to generalize as something one either knew or did not. In other words, each reminiscence is a live performance. —from Reminded by the Instruments (2021: Nakai, 150)
