Sleeping Beauty

I laid in that bed for years. Longer.

The length alludes time. In that bed, the years sped up. I died in that bed. I loved and wed in that bed. I birthed in that bed, I worked in that bed.

The bed lived in my apartment, in the storage room where it was dark, and safe, and cozy. Nothing could hurt me in that room, and nothing ever tried. It was haunted, like it had a ghost. Not me, a real one. One that would sit on the edge of my bed while I lay there for days.

I ignored my body in that bed, and then I started to ignore my soul, last my mind. Days, weeks, months, years spent on tik tok. Short form videos dominating my mind until I saw trends behind my eyes.

I want something different.

People know. They know when they look at me, that I’m off. They see me slanted, italicized from pain. The bed is gone but they can still see my position. The hitched left hip, the right rib twisted forward, the left rib twisted back. Scoliosis caused by a bed I loved so deeply I wanted it to imprint me.

“Be careful,” I’d whisper to myself when my husband couldn’t hear me, when my roommate couldn’t hear me, when my lover cousin’t hear me. — “What your doing may come back to haunt you.”

It did.

It’s ghost imprinted on me.

The ghost of a woman before the woman was me.

Who lays there.

Who stays there — always laying down.

Always in that bed.

Never getting up, not even for me.

I threw that bed away, eventually.

But still…I let myself lay in that bed too.

Years passed. Millions of trends gone by.

That people don’t remember anymore.

But I do.

That and the safety of my bed are the only real things.

When I got up I saw I’d developed a slump.

A hump — sticking out of my left shoulder.

As if the mattress had stolen in.

While I was laying there.

I thought it might be sadness.

But no tears would come out of my eyes, and I tried,

And tried to cry, but they wouldn’t come.

Because there was no sadness inside, just me, sitting on the bedside.

Begging with myself

to get up — to fight — for the future inside.

Because now my posture won’t go back in the same way.

So I come, and sit, on the edge of her bed.

Every day and I say

“Get up bitch, get up and live. You don’t want to change yourself this way.”

At first there was nothing, nothing! Not even a hint of recognition, just missed meals and fitful naps that leave her stumbling into the bathroom at 3am on brand new feet.

But then she started to stir.

Not much.

Only a hair.

Flipped back, here and there.

And then it was the eyes, they rolled all the way inside.

Until they could see me, her future, standing beside her bedside.

“Tell me what to do?” she asked.

“Go get out of bed”, I said, but of course, she didn’t understand.

When she wakes she won’t remember the dream.

It just has to be that way.