This essay is featured today on www.skirt.com - where I am guest blogging for the month of April. Check out skirt, a cool women's magazine, and enjoy:
It has happened. I’ve only been married two years…and I have become obsessed with another. And I have had this other. Repeatedly. Constantly. I am committed as one consumed by dementia. My passion knows no limits, my hunger, no satisfaction.
I am in love with my bed.
I dream of it when we are not together. Like a pimply teenager on the cusp of hormonal greatness, I fantasize. I count the minutes until our next assignation, I yearn desperately, fiercely for more of the disastrous affair. While driving in traffic I imagine the sweet burn of our two halves uniting. I long for the evenings I slip away, my husband blessedly distracted in his own rituals. No one knows.
I am in love with my bed.
I do not know when we first discovered each other. Sure, we were acquaintances; we saw each other daily in the course of our own routines. Perhaps we had always taken the relationship for granted. The fixation came upon me slowly, then devoured me like a fever. Had I never noticed the softness, the inexplicable and unconditional comfort my bed provided, night after night, lonely morning after lonely morning? Its delicious sheets and pillows, warm blankets and fluffy throws, all blended into one rollicking tangle of deep relaxation and bliss? The lust I had never known! How had I overlooked the dizzying escape that our togetherness provided?
I could stay with you forever, I thought, and it became a dangerous habit. When we parted it was like being torn in half. We know each other, sharing our most private and revealing secrets. In my bed I am me. It has seen me at my worst, clipping toenails and blowing my nose, unflattering pajamas and sick days. Through it all, my bed has stood by me.
Each morning as my eyes open to the cruel daylight, I bound from my bed and make it - quickly, efficiently; straightening its comforter, flattening its sheets, fluffing and positioning its pillows. Sometimes I slap the mattress, though I know this is cruel. Then I leave the room without looking back.
If I don’t make my bed immediately, I will simply get back in. And we’d spend the whole day together, isolated, keeping the world at bay. I work hard to ignore its whimpers of protest, its cries for my return. Instead, I murmur to its silky creases and 400 thread count depths….Ah….there are but sixteen hours between us my darling! And I rush to my husband’s side at the breakfast table, giving away nothing.
Sometimes, we risk being together during the day. If I am “working at home” and my husband is away with obligations, I creep to the top of the stairs and open the bedroom door. My lover’s joy is palpable as I rip the covers from its body and plunge into the trembling core….and hour goes by, maybe more….and the phone rings, or the dog barks, or guilt washes over me at the incredible number of dishes in the sink.
I smooth the covers, pat the innocence back into the pillows, and go about my day…dreaming of our next reunion.
Once we were almost discovered. A neighbor knocked, carrying a Fedex package meant for me. My car was in the driveway; of course she thought me home, a dutiful wife, perhaps making stew. I rushed from the room, deep creases of evidence covering my cheek and forehead, mascara scandalously smudged, drool recently dried to white flakes on my chin. I tried to iron out my cheeks, arrange my hair, but the door opened and -- I saw the disgust on her face, the envious disapproval in her eyes. Would she tell?
The event shook me and I stayed away for almost ten hours after that. But it is an affair I cannot end. I have no solution.
I’ve tried to end it, of course. But being in the same house together, seeing each other every day…it’s complicated. Sure I know what you’re thinking. Just get rid of it. Sell it on ebay, go away for a while or at least sleep in another room. You don’t understand. Obviously you’ve never been in love like this, for real.
I just had to tell someone.
