OK, so I'm feeling saucy about the whole writing thing today. Actually, I find that writing helps lessen the anxiety. This is why I'm on my fourth post of the day and ready to tell you about the "Night of the Pillows".
Leslie and I have had trouble sleeping in recent months. This is probably due to the hand-me-down mattress in our room that is older than we are combined. The trick about sleeping on our mattress is that you have to lay in one spot until the spring that's poking you wakes you up, but not long enough for said spring to actually bruise a rib. Then you reposition, rinse, and repeat over and over until morning. If your lucky you will only wake up 2 or 3 times and you won't sustain any lasting contusions.
Back around Christmas, we finally decided, while watching the bionic woman commercial, to give the sleep number bed some thought. After all, bionic people have to sleep too, right? We took a trip to our nearest sleep number store and fell in love with the bed. However, we were in the final throws of a grueling 3-year effort to get out of debt. We decided that when we could pay cash, we would return and purchase the bed of our dreams (no pun intended). As an intermediate step, though, we decided to purchase contoured pillows - expensive contoured pillows. They're not cheap, World, but they are amazing! They cradle your head in perfect support almost causing you to forget that your being poked in the ribs my a recalcitrant steel coil.
We brought our pillows home and unboxed them. I slept on mine for a few nights and then it was time to change the sheets and cases. Leslie stripped the old bedding and set our naked pillows aside. When it came time to make the bed, I helped. We had all of the sheets on in perfect teamwork when she picked up the pillows. Without their outer coverings, they were identical. They had the same contoured shape. They weighed the same. They were the same color. They were exactly alike except for one extremely important thing - I didn't know which one was mine! All my life I have been very picky about my pillows making sure that no one else slept on them and that I used mine and only mine in complete fidelity until down do us part.
When she handed me my pillow, she noticed the terror on my face. She was concerned because this was before "The Morning of the Orange" and she still didn't know about the "crazy". "What's wrong?" she said. "I...I...don't know if it's mine," I choked. "They're identical," she replied. She didn't understand and I was still hiding so I couldn't explain. I unboxed that pillow! I and I alone had slept upon it. Now something that belonged to me may have been lost! That's really the fear - losing my stuff. I don't lose my stuff. Everything goes in the same place every time according to years of time-tested ritual and practice. I wasn't appalled at the idea of sleeping on a pillow my wife had used or anything like that. This wasn't about wife cooties. This was about lost stuff and that, my friends, is a big, big, deal to a person with my brand of "crazy".
I couldn't sleep on it. I just laid it aside and rolled over eventually falling asleep in silence on my auxiliary pillow. I awoke, for the usual checking of the house (more later), around 3 am. After staring out the window, deep breathing for 45 minutes, and performing half a dozen decontamination rituals, I was finally able to sleep on the pillow. Leslie now assures me that the two pillows are separate at all times and I shall never again be parted from the one on my side of the bed. Someday, I hope to be free of this junk. Then I may just mix them up myself employing ridiculous things like odd numbers, asymmetrical patterns, and all manor of normal person whimsicality. For now, I'll keep saving for the bed. At this point I would give anything for the ability to get some sleep.
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