This Bed Here Now

A Meditation on 28 and 34

Another personal essay. In MFA land, use of the second person is considered amateurish; it felt good to indulge.

Special thanks to Francesca Lia Block, Linda Davis, and the Lit AngelsFrancesca’s Substack team for featuring this piece in Issue #16.

Coming soon here on Unpopping are some awesome interviews—one with an ADHD researcher, and another with an amazing therapist and podcaster. Stay tuned 🫶🏻📚🧠🔎💕 and as always—thank you for reading.

🛌

 

You are a 34-year-old white woman in Los Angeles. The AirPods in your ears are taking you through a playlist you found by searching “video game explore ocean” on Spotify, with the crossfade set to max. Your room smells like patchouli, sage, and palo santo, and you are pushing your plush, moss-green, Innerwell-branded eye mask up so you can peek out at your world. You’re coming out of a ketamine session; which is to say, you’re re-introducing yourself to the world after your time away. (That 45-minute period where you gleefully became the clay that made the ancient Roman aqueducts, and then you were the water in the aqueducts, and then you were the water in the moss, and then you were the moss.) 

Here in your bed—the weighted blanket still across your lap, the earthy smoke still enveloping you, the ketamine still fuzzing and bubbling your world, the green and blue instrumentals still flowing through your brain from AirPod to AirPod—you reach for the Tupperware on your nightstand and begin peacefully nibbling the slice of gooey pecan pie your mom sent you home with this evening after dinner. (You hadn’t shared much at dinner beyond that you were fine.)

The sweet gooeyness, the nuttiness; the earthiness of the patchouli and sage and palo santo; the cool, twinkling swells of the atmospheric soundtrack—all have you insulated. Your cat sits against your thigh, warm and purring. 

  You climbed into this nest not long ago, wondering who you were at 28–wondering if your 28-year-old self might hold some kind of key you could find and show your therapist on Thursday morning—your therapist who might know which lock that key goes to.

  And now, slowly awakening, feeling slightly rearranged, you pick up where you left off: watching in your mind the 28-year-old woman you once were. Who is she—who am I? 

 

I live in western Massachusetts, where I am currently in bed. My down comforter is thick and heaven-white, but my room is freezing—the radiator broke. 

  I came out here to make sense of what had happened in Denver, where I had run to in order to make sense of what had happened in my family. 

Here, at 28, what had happened in my family and what had happened in Denver are all folded accordion-style beneath what has just happened. 

What has just happened is, I came to western Massachusetts and my brain broke, so I went to rehab, and then I was fine; then, I got raped, but I couldn’t possibly let that affect me, I had other injuries to tend to, so I decided I was fine again; then, my father killed himself, so I grieved appropriately, elegantly, even, and again said I was fine, because I DID feel fine, the way silt is fine—whisper-quiet and limp; and then, as my final semester of grad school began in August, I got into this western Massachusetts heaven-white bed, where I will remain until my flight to LAX on December 18th.

  I don’t know why I’m in bed; I just know that when I get out of bed—or put my phone down, or close my computer (Friends on loop)—I have to think ten thoughts at a time in order to think at all. It is garish, painful, too loud, too bright, and too cold. 

Bed is much better.

This bed in western Massachusetts is 3,000 miles and six years away from the bed you’re in now, where you are wrapped in your weighted blanket, ketamine, blue-green music, incense, pecan pie, and a cat who loves you. 

  That bed, where you are right now, is so different from the one that I climbed into and never truly left. 

There in Los Angeles, outside, there are palm trees and a light-polluted-purple night sky—not the bare branches lumped with snow, the proper blue-black of New-England-small-town winter. It’s almost as though you’re in an entirely different world, there.

 

But, it is the same world—the way the water in our bodies is the same water as was in the ancient Roman aqueducts. 

  Earlier today, you went to the pottery studio, where you sunk your hands into clay. The clay was made of the same earth that was beneath the snow that winter six years ago. 

  And your bed, here, now—made of that same stuff; same as the bed that came before. And before, and before.