i slept in a twin bed until i was 18 years old, including my first year of college, when i lived in a two-person dorm room with two other people (unadvised). i wonder if this conditioned me to sleep still like a corpse – if flailing means falling, you learn by failure or fear of it. to this day i hardly thrash at all unless i’m feverish or anxious, and thus not actually asleep in technical terms. it’s my view that the twin bed requires long-term training, and those without it will struggle to understand the twin’s charms.
the twin bed has always been exactly the right size to hold me, and, magically, whomever else i decide to invite into it. what we have here is a sort of sisterhood of the traveling twin bed situation. or something akin to the invisibility cloak from harry potter, which is maybe a stretch, but didn’t it seem like it could always fit like seven people?
i digress. my sophomore year of college, i moved into the bottom floor of a townhouse in an overpriced college apartment complex called the woodlands, where belligerent frat boys frequently pissed, puked, and splashed bud light as if spraying champagne off the balcony above my porch. this was a huge problem, because the miscellaneous tomfoolery often interrupted my spliff. it was always raining something. it was hell. it was fine. but by then i had a full, and a mandala-printed urban outfitters comforter i used for the next three years.
i didn’t used to seek new. i sought different in other ways. looking back i feel amazed by how little i thought about my material environment, especially considering how obsessed with it i feel now. just fourth house moon things. domesticity. anyway that means nothing to you.
at some point, i shoved that hippie comforter in a closet somewhere, sold my bed and shared a queen with a man for far too long. for a few months, living in atlanta, i slept in it alone, this time on my own side because that’s what i’d been designated. why didn’t i stretch out? go diagonal like the good old days? i finally had a queen and i certainly wasn’t acting like one.
pandemic, around november, i moved back in with my parents. just like that, all that nonsense, just to end up in the twin. i didn’t feel bigger, or older, or wiser. as always, it seemed to me exactly the right size.
when i moved to utah, alone again, a friend gave me a full. it occupied most of the limited real estate in my dingy basement bedroom. i didn’t yet have enough pillows to comfortably sprawl from corner to corner, but a few months of frequent thrifting and that problem was quickly solved. i hated that house, but i made home in my room as i always do – i can’t write or read or make unless my space reflects my insides.
like clockwork, that winter, i fell in love with a queen. what i meant to say is that i fell in love with a man. this man did, in fact, happen to have a queen sized mattress, and we shared that bed for months before i even moved in.
i don’t know how it happened, but i’m back in the twin. this time i can’t shake the feeling that i’m slipping off its edge. i imagine my limbs like tentacles, lolling limp out from my torso, grasping for surface to laze on and finding only empty space.
i guess it doesn’t matter how big small sometimes feels. it’s still small. and at some point, you actually grow enough to notice.
obsession of the week
fka twigs performing this hauntingly beautiful cover of elite 90s banger “it’s a fine day,” mashed up at the end with her own song, “sad day.” genius from cover to cover.
I’m also in a twin. I got it for free haha
keep growin girl 💗