sleeping on her floor

to my right lies a few objects: my journal, a pen, paw paw ointment, a used tissue, it doesn’t matter. they live there. i sleep on my side of the bed.

i can never seem to sprawl out when i’m alone. i am never smaller than when i am unobserved, this i’m noticing more and more. i gravitate to lying in the negative space, i require a crampedness, the dust of a little nook. all those hours spent crawling under beds and behind closets despite my dire allergy, comfort toys in tow. this i still do, i nest. in long island city i lived out of an airbnb, a spotless and entirely white studio apartment, with the brightest sheets on the biggest bed i had ever slept in. i made an office in one corner, books and journals open to the page. in another, my vanity instruments had been poured from their TSA approved bags onto the doona. korean lipsticks in shades such as ‘berry shot’ and ‘cherry bomb’ threatened to stain the sheets in ways the Sonder maintenance team couldn’t dream of. it was like an island, that king bed. a room within a room. it was so quiet, windows like an airlock, i remember. when i moved out the sheets were still tucked tight on its right side. i started sleeping with someone new and found that i was dragging my bag throughout his apartment, room to room. ‘got your nest?’ i did.

my apartment is not very big so it must be that it is too empty. i shift from my bed to my armchair and then back to the bed, and most days i don’t even make it to the chair. i yearn for a tiny little box, the cardboard ones i’d hoard and sit in as a child, and i wonder what i make room for, if not for me. am i waiting, saving? do i deny myself, cut off parts of myself, to make me a more efficient machine? do i really see myself that way, a machine?

i worry about the ethics of it all, the femaleness of it. it is incredibly inane work. to make oneself small is no challenge for the girl; the ache of the emptiness abounds in all directions until you keel over into yourself like a child in the womb, stay in the sheets a bit longer. i’ve known women who disappear this way, diminished into nothingness and missing in action. names now spoken barely above a whisper. sometimes they change it, their names, and the word means nothing to me now. guiltily i know not if i envy them, that dainty mystique that seems to come so unnaturally to me, me, boisterous and irrevocably constant. perhaps then it is more in my nature to sprawl out, to grow up and grow voracious. there is doubtless a femaleness in that too.

lie on your side, in the recovery position. im a prolific cryer. listening to my body and following its cues, sometimes a cry flashes me back to another cry, an older cry. the reverb of ache at the back of the throat, sinuses tightening, ringing through the skull. shivers, maybe, but they feel different when you’re crying. hot instead of cold. all mouth and jaw, temples, eyelids. where are you now? lucid dreaming, the muscle memory of squeezing eyes shut and of stuttering breath are some of the first we ever learn, before our ducts even know to produce tears, and those moments of desperation - portals for the body to become something different. not quite a child yet. sometimes a wave hits me the same as it has before, but i can never remember where, i come to too quickly. i’m in bed. it is a most beautiful sponge for my excess.

i wake after an evening of crying to a monolidded face in the mirror, puffy and unrecognisable. crying is transformative like that, but i bare teeth and i grow cruel. would you see it that way? i have considered not crying, as many of my friends seem to do, but they tell me that it is no way to live - that they envy my ability to let go into a slobbering, maniacal woman-girl. most of them being female hysterics and men you couldn’t pry open with a meat cleaver, i’m inclined to agree. and no, i don’t believe there is a middle ground.

i leave the bed occasionally. the public library has since childhood been one of my favourite third places, it’s where i write this now, and yesterday my friends and i hopped in and out of the sex shops lining King street - another third place not too dissimilar from the library (theres almost always a playgroup happening). i realise i think about third places often, always looking. in Adult World it was empty and quiet despite the steady stream of patrons, the club music playing overhead. i tell Juri that it feels like i could find a nice corner and open up a book for a while. i watch the live footage monitor on the counter as Juri enquires about penis pumps, which reminded me of the chinese cupping medicine my parents would use on my back as a sick child, but different.

four eighty pixels of the stairwell leading up from the street, a string of old fairy lights wrapped around the handrail, men of all varieties making their appearance. as they walked past the screen they appeared behind me, gave a quick glance at my friend and i, but mainly at him, before disappearing behind the door marked playroom $10 entry $5 lunch special. i’m unable to look away from the sign. i had before wondered how many people could fit in a bed, but in that moment i would’ve died to know how many could fit in that room. as we’re leaving down the stairwell i ask Juri if he had ever been in there, and he says no, and i’m a little disappointed even though i know the security camera is looking.