some clean, well-fitted sheets

Let’s just begin with the starkly factual, shall we?

Two years ago, my then-boyfriend Donny bought me a lovely knock-off Tempur-Pedic® mattress. A year later, after we’d broken up, Donny bought himself the same mattress in a Queen size (which, parenthetically, was a size bigger than his old bed and the size I’d been advocating for him to buy but that he resisted saying it wouldn’t fit through his hall, an idea I pooh-poohed and which subsequently was shown to be correct in pooh-poohing, but I digress). He did not buy himself new sheets. Rather, he chose to suffer as a martyr to his sheets, apparently refusing to accept the full flower of comfort his new bed could offer.

In the past few months, I’ve seen Donny a few times. I recognized now how completely ill-thought-out my recurrent decisions to see him have been, how much through seeing him I’ve willingly allowed my fragile psyche to suffer, and how thoroughly I must cut off all contact with him. Whilst in the throes of Donny, however, I realized none of that, and I was suffused with the Donny warm-and-fuzzy of yore. In the midst of that optimistic glow, I bought him a set of sheets for his birthday.

They are lovely sheets, if pictures and customer testimonials can be believed, and I like to think they can. They are ice blue, 800ct, Egyptian cotton sheets that were sold on Overstock.com at a ludicrously low price. I ordered them for Donny because it was his birthday and because as thoughtless as he has been emotionally, he has been terribly generous materially, and I incorrectly thought that buying the sheets was the least I could do.

Buying him nothing, I realize now, would have actually been the least I could do, but the sheets have been bought, and they have been delivered, and while I’m sure that Donny continues his bed-linen martyrdom, I like to think he’s washed them and dressed his bed properly.

It is hard when talking about a couple, a bed, a break-up, and all the echoing emotional resonance surrounding the break-up, not to tread upon the metaphoric. Put a bed and a break-up into a story and you’re going to load it with figurative pathos with a mechanical kind of precision. This story, this break-up and this bed is no different.

I think of Donny sleeping in his shoddy, slippy sheets. I know him well enough to feel the palpable anxiety he has over buying the full bed kit and caboodle, for he needs not merely new sheets but new bedcovers, new pillows, new everything. It is a lot, and I sense Donny’s overwhelmed feeling. But I also know him well enough to know that to this man a rose may be a rose be a rose, but a bed is not a bed is not a bed. A bed has meaning.

I know my X well enough to recognize that his refusal to fully flesh the comfort of the new mattress is as much to preclude him from being fully rested, fully relaxed or fully sexed. The ill-fitting sheets create an excuse for Donny not to invite anyone to his bed; he can’t be seen with these crazy sheets that flap and wad and come, like an unbalanced mind, undone. He also can’t give to himself the full gift of physical contentment. He must, like a medieval priest, mortify his flesh. He girds his loins with that Catholic shirt of guilt. I know him well enough to know this.

So Donny’s refusal to buy new sheets for ten months after buying a new mattress is a complex psychological, emotional and spiritual issue. It is a tangled knot of guilt, protection, and anxiety. It’s also ridiculous because he has, in the past ten months, also bought several new pieces of furniture (including two different bed frames), painted his entire apartment, refinished his floors, and hired a decorator to help him with all of it. This thick tectonic plate of home-decorating evidence adds credence to my theory that Donny’s stalwart unwillingness to buy new sheets has nothing to do with his bed and everything to do with his head. This is, after all, a man who has refused to make his bed, and in doing so, he only partially lies in it.

That is Donny’s sheet metaphor. I have my own.

For the thing is this: I can rationalize my buying of sheets as an altruistic move on the part of a still-loving girlfriend who, above all, just wants the best for her X. And on some level that is true, though in my heart of darkest hearts I wish that while Donny does well, I myself do a little better. I can rationalize my untoward purchase as the last act of my love, but I know better.

I know that my choice to buy sheets is as much loaded—nay, fraught—with symbolism as his refusal. I know that these sheets are a potent symbol. Things hold the ineffable halo of those who touched, or bought, them. I will always, for example, connect my breasts with Will because he lent me the money for my implants. Likewise, my back right lower molar belongs to Donny, for he paid for its cap, and I’d have lost that tooth were it not for his benevolence. Given this invisible and undeniable connection between object and giver,  if Donny uses these sheets, and he may not, Donny will feel me. He will be even more reminded of me than he already is. He will be touched, at night, in the dark, at his most vulnerable moments, by the long hand of the relationship-dead me. And he will, eventually, have sex with another woman on a tangible, 800ct, luxury reminder of me. I know all this; I knew it buying the sheets; and yet I still bought them.

Because rationalization is a human trait, I must offer it here. I bought the set of sheets (bottom fitted with 18” pockets, top flat and two pillowcases) in the sanguine blush that he and I might reconcile. It was a stupid hope, a jejune hope, a hope far too green for a woman of my olive age, but it was a hope I had. The hope is dead. I have really, truly totally realized that he and I are finished, and now that the Mad Hatter’s pity party has hopped on down the bunny trail, I’m learning to live with it. The long, slow and agonizing death of this relationship has caused me to experience the five stages of grief. I believe acceptance has finally started to settle like concrete. It’s something to build on.

I myself, unlike the waiter at the end of the Hemingway story, am sleeping just fine. I have not, like the dignified drunk old man, actually tried to commit suicide, though I have imagined it. Those days seem past, these days, and these nights, though I recognize that many must have insomnia, I’m not one of them.

Comments

[D'jaevle]

I was tempted to write something pithy about how things never truly conclude, they just evolve and change, but the truth is, some things need finality.

Some things require a period at the end. If only so we can write what comes next.

(although, I should note, your blog, or however you decide to showcase your writing, is not such a case; more, please.)

[Svasti]

An ex of mine bought me sheets once - deep garnet red satin sheets. We had sex on them alot.

When our torrid affair of hearts, minds and bodies finally ended (and it was almost as brutal as the end of things for you and Donny)... I eventually got rid of those sheets. It was too intimate, too close in.

However, you did what you thought you needed to do. Perhaps doing just that, is what brought you to the realisation you know have. If for no other reason, then it was a good present. To yourself.

Be gentle on you, eh?

[X on the MTA]

I missed your writing so much. Seeing this pop-up on my RSS reader today was very much like finding a favorite candy in the pocket of an old jacket long after it's been discontinued.

[Pete]

CG,
Glad to hear from you. Additionally, you seem to be able to deal with the Donny issue with much more clarity than previously. As always, I wish you well and implore you to keep writing. I miss the erudite musings.
Pete

[alphagirl]

It is good to see you starting to heal and come out of the funk you have been in...and to see you back writing is wonderful!

[minstrel boy]

remember CG, there are always two sides to any breakup.

yours.

and the asshole's.

[badinfluencegirl]

i'm just happy to see you posting again...

and i still want to give you a hug and get you drunk...

i have toys i can't use anymore because they are so intimately tied to the man that i tried them with... even if they only touched my flesh and never his.

[Neysa]

I'll add to the chorus of well-wishers who are happy to see you writing here again. I didn't find your blog until you had gone on hiatus, and I felt rather like someone who has stumbled on the perfect shade of lipstick only to find it has been discontinued. And though I am sorry about your travails, I am glad they have brought you back here, no matter how long you stay.

I am still suffering over the loss of a great love, six months after seeing him for the last time, but it occurs to me just now while reading this that . . . it's been a while since I felt that knife-blade of despair. It's possible now for me to think of my life without him in it. Huh. When did that happen?