Bed of My Youth

Last night as I was laying in the dream-awake state, fantasizing about some mundane detail of tomorrow, I woke myself up. Not all the way up, I just startled myself back into a lazy consciousness and for the first time in years I didn't know where I was.

There was a spot of light, or was it my imagination, on the wall beside me. For a moment that spot was the window in my old bedroom on Powell Street. A pink canopy (the canopy Mom and I argued over endlessly, her saying it was too childish, me liking the cocoon it encompassed me within) rests protectively over me as I sleep. The windchime hangs in front of the air vents, jingling in the central air, and the Degas hangs menacingly at the foot of my bed, the figures of ballerinas strange in the night light. I sleep alone with Puff and two pillows in the single bed. My door is never shut because Mom is afraid of carbon monoxide poisoning, and she'll peek in on me and open the door a little wider before she goes to bed late at night. I'm still a child nestled like an egg between Mommy and Daddy, still unable to conceive of a life outside of this bedroom. There is a lifetime of firsts ahead of me, if they can sneak in beneath the lace roof over my head and penetrate my child's sleep. My heart and body are unbroken, untouched as my mother's watchful eyes rest on me, peering through the darkness until she is satisfied I am safe in my sleep.

I woke up knowing I wasn't in my parent's house. I haven't slept in that bed in 8 years- it and my canopy are long gone along with the pink innocence I slept enveloped in. But for a moment last night, in between dreaming and waking, I thought I was in the bed of my childhood in the home of my parents. When I finally broke through the confused haze I remembered the blue attic roof and the wide empty bed I share with the cat, my fears, my tears, and occasionally a man, under a sea foam green duvet. The Degas sat beside me, but its figures have lost their menacing touch in the last ten years. Then I drifted off again, a woman once more, caught up in mundane sometimes innocent fantasies about tomorrow.