243. From My Bed - Tamzin Merivale
Jean-Édouard Vuillard, Au Lit (1891)
It is my firm belief that true happiness in life is a rock-hard mattress.
It is my firm belief that true happiness in life is a rock-hard mattress.
From this flimsy hospital bed, the sterilized linoleum floor looks more inviting for a good night's sleep than this narrow, sagging, hot Mattress of Despair. It makes me think of all the beds I’ve ever slept in, and all the ones that I’ve forgotten. The beds that felt like home, and those that felt like hell. The beds I shared with friends, and others I shared with lovers.
It makes me think about my mattress at home, of how we struggled to buy it, in a new country and a new language, and about the airbed we slept on while we waited for it to arrive, which deflated every night.
It makes me think of my third apartment in Florence, living alone—at last, where I slept on an old sofa bed and woke to the sound of motorinos and the passionate arguments of my neighbors, which I eventually came to understand.
It brings back a hot and sweaty room that I can barely remember in northern Zambia, a hotel room in Harare shared with strangers, a bunk bed in a hut, a damp floor in Aden, another hospital bed—not so different from this one—in Marrakech. And a filthy room in Dakar, buzzing with mosquitoes, which I loved nonetheless, because I was seventeen years old and on my own in Africa.
I think of a blanket on the sand under the stars in Mauritania, bats flapping about. Of crawling into a tent in the Tuscan forest at dawn, after lying in the hot springs in the dark, sotto la luna. I remember “The Bus,” a room with a view in Sana’a that belonged to a friend, where I woke to the gentle muezzin’s call every morning—replaced, soon after I left, by the whistle and roar of bombs.
A cozy bed by the fire also floats into my mind, where every year with friends, after walking along the coast in the wind, rain, or sun, we laugh and talk for hours into the night. Never mind the beds where I’ve been violently ill while traveling—should’ve been more careful—or the beds that held me through sadness and grief, in their desperate grip. The bed where I woke to the sound of a church choir in Slovenia, holding beauty and mourning together in my heart.
My parents’ bed, where I went for cuddles when I was little. Or the house on the cliff on an island in Spain, where I could breathe for the first time after a year of sorrow, and where, waking early, I stepped out onto the balcony to watch the sun rise over the sea, filling me up with color and light.
Waking, drifting, tossing, turning, dreaming, laughing, crying, bonding—so many beds, so many memories, and inshallah, many more that lie ahead.
- Tamzin Merivale
