Post 15: Beds

The room is frozen. A bed, a chair, both empty.What does it mean?

Bed. Home. Remembering isolation.

It is one of those hushes in the room.

But then young E. calls out, it must be different if you are married. It’s no longer your bed, but shared; but this brings to my mind the intolerable  times when you cannot share it, when you are the one who has had to move.

And as I ponder this, privately, quietly, there must be so many other ‘bed’ stories people will not share--because it is too painful, or tender, or caring. Maybe watching someone pass away, or the fear of their pained selves left alone--but one elder lets that one speak through her tears.  Or even the good memories when the earth opened and the baby came. On that bed:   two for tea, but home  for 3.  Or of beds shared with sisters, top to tail. R again pipes up: under the bed; that’s where many slept when they were young.

I never once hear anyone here talk of their poverty whilst younger, not in those terms, but yes to the lack of space, of sharing space with others, of not being able to spread.

Beds.

Rest. 

Isolation.

A trampoline.

The complexity of those sheets, what is wrapped in those sheets, what thoughts rest on those pillows, I am quite sure dreams revisit me, fully, when I put my head back to the pillow, from the night before. That rich veil-- the unconscious, painting and pooling a landscape so colourful that your cheek on the pillowslip draws you back down.

No body mentions sex.

Maybe that’s because it actually is a hospital bed in front of us and who links sex with hospitals?  and for a group of ageing people, it threatens a finishing, rather than a beginning.

Then K. really sparks things up, talking about being naughty and ‘sent to bed’. Naughty beds, naughty beds, what a wonderful sound. Naughty beds, with the elves dancing, bruising the sheets, kicking up their heels.

R. then leans across and chats about money stashed in the bed, about disordered sheets, dirty beds, bedbugs and germs, about hiding under beds, or a large family with children having to fit in and sleep under it.  Of the comfort and need for your own, even after a nice holiday. What is that. Of imprints left in the bed, I thought of dreams left in pillows, other peoples smells. R’s children crawling into her bed, when they were sick; young E. says she stills crawls in to her mother's whenever she visits home. 

David throws gladioli across  the bed; it becomes a coffin. R. says 'not like those tiny flowers and chocolates on pillows in hotels'.

Ba boom. The punch line, and the heartbeat. The heart comes home, to a taste, a delicacy. Beating home.

c. Z Soboslay 2015.