Walls Are Meant for Painting Over (Blog #220)

Leave a comment November 5, 2017 CoCo

Last night I slept in a twin-sized bed, the one I slept in from childhood until the summer I moved out of my parents’ house at the tender age of twenty-eight. My dad’s best friend growing up was a guy named Ronnie, and Ronnie’s dad, Roger, handmade the bed, which has a trundle, sometime before I started remembering things. Roger worked for a local furniture company during the day, and at night he’d craft his own furniture, which he said was his therapy. I guess he needed a lot of it (who doesn’t?), since Roger not only made my bed, but also made my entire bedroom suite, part of which I said goodbye to last year when I had the estate sale. What remains, however, is the bed, a nightstand, a dresser, a toy chest, and some other piece of furniture I can’t describe but that my sister spilled nail polish on when we were kids, so it needs refinishing.

Anyway, most of that furniture is crammed into the room I grew up in. I’ve been staying in a different room since I moved back home–my sister’s old room–but sometimes I go into my old room to search for things or practice yoga. The room itself is smaller than my sister’s, but it currently has more floor space. Twin beds, after all, don’t take up much room. Today I went in there to exercise, and I noticed a small chip in the brown paint, really no bigger than a sunflower seed. Beneath it were tiny flecks of baby blue and dark grey–baby blue from when we moved here when I was five, dark grey from when I was in high school and decided to remodel, replacing the cartoon train border with a Coca-Cola one.

I don’t usually think much about it, but sometimes when I’m in my old room, I’m swept away by nostalgia. The blinds are wide, aluminum, something I picked out at some point and matched with a retro fabric band that holds them together. Around the window is a set of adjustable shelves we had custom-made. Now they hold some of my dad’s collectables and a few family photos, one of me in a Boss t-shirt, trying to be all sexy, as if that’s possible when you’re thirteen. But I can still remember the way I alphabetized my CDs on those shelves, exactly where my collection of Tim Sandlin books went. Around the top of the room are other built-in shelves that once held my collection of Legos, Batman toys, and Coke bottles. Now those things have all been sold, and God knows where they ended up, other than my memory.

When I think about the trundle-bed, I remember Dad used to hide me in the trundle part whenever my friends would come over and play hide-and-seek. At bedtime he’d tuck me in real, real tight on both sides so that I couldn’t wiggle or squirm. Then he’d turn out the lights, and there I’d stay, all wrapped up until morning, since I hadn’t yet experienced the need to get up in the middle of the night to pee. But something about the pressure of the tightly tucked-in sheets, I guess, made me feel safe. Then again, I didn’t think much about safety back then or whether or not the world was a scary place to live. Not like I do now. I just assumed everything would be all right.

When I was a kid, the bed had a regular mattress. But when I was a teenager, Roger came over to the house and reinforced the sides in order to convert it into a waterbed. I can still see him placing the brackets. Anyway, it’s been that way ever since, although it usually stays unplugged, unheated, and unused unless my nephews are visiting. When I was in my mid-twenties, I wrote an essay about the bed. I’d have to dig it up, but my dad still jokes about it because I basically blamed my small bed for my not growing up sooner. After all, twin beds don’t offer a lot of room–for growing, stretching out, or spending the night with someone else. I guess Dad thinks things would have been different, life would have been better for me, if I’d gotten a bigger bed before I moved out in my late twenties. (Maybe he thinks I would have moved out sooner.) But today I told him, “Dad, I’m fine. I was being poetic.”

Getting far in life has absolutely nothing to do with where you’re physically standing.

Of course, I prefer a bigger bed. They are great for spreading out, certainly for hosting others. Not that I’ve done any hosting since moving back in with Mom and Dad, but I did pick the bed in my sister’s old room because it’s larger–king-size, I think. Plus it’s been easier to not be in my old room. I guess sometimes when I go in there, it does feel like I haven’t gotten very far in life. Like, here I am–thirty-seven, same fucking town, same fucking room. But then I look at the picture of that thirteen-year-old kid, I remember everything we’ve survived in the last twenty-four years, and I’m reminded that growth and getting far in life have absolutely nothing to do with where you’re physically standing.

The bed in my sister’s room is just all right. It used to belong to my aunt and her husband, so I’m guessing the mattress is at least as old as I am. Anyway, my back has been hurting since I moved back home, and I’ve simply been blaming it on the fact that I was in a car accident or that my back just hurts sometimes. But since my back didn’t hurt while I was in Colorado and New Mexico, I decided to warm up the waterbed to see if it would make a difference. And whereas I can’t say that my back has felt like a miracle today, I do think it’s been better.

More than anything else, crawling into bed last night truly felt like coming home again. My sister’s old room is on the corner of the house, and it’s always cold this time of year. But my old room is in the middle of the house–it’s smaller, warmer, cozier. Of course, the waterbed itself is warm, the sheets flannel and inviting. Crawling under the covers last night felt like slipping into the biggest hug. Pulling the comforter across me, I could feel the pressure, the okay kind that makes all the other pressures of life seem bearable. All it felt–familiar–as if I’d been there and done that ten thousand times before. Obviously, I had, and it’s no wonder I slept better than I have in maybe a year, even if my toes were a little crowded. Now part of me wants to hold on to that bed forever, as if it had the power to turn back the clock and make everything all right again. But another part of me knows it can’t do that–that’s my job. Beds, after all, are meant only for sleeping, just as walls are meant for painting over and boys are meant for growing up.

Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)

It's never a small thing to open your home or heart to another person.