A Note from Your Air Mattress

What’s up?! It’s me, your Air Matress.

You remember me, right?

I’m the thing you “love sooo much!” when a relative pulls into town but you just forget about me for the other 360 days out of the year.

I gotta say, it pisses me off. I’m always giving. Helping you out but nobody asks, “How I’m doing.” You just assume, “I’m still good”

I am not still good. I have not been good since 2019 because you treat me like shit.

I don’t deserve this life. Treated like a prisoner in solitary confinement. Living in a dark closet that smells like a rotting apple that baby Kathryn hid in here 8 months go.

Here is my life: I get dragged out four times a year, always at 11 p.m., because you forgot to set me up earlier. (And lets me honest, most of the time your drunk). Then I get unrolled onto a floor that isn’t vacuumed. I get plugged into a pump that sounds like a leaf blower but odder LOUDER? and for ninety humiliating seconds the whole family stands around watching me inflate like “Ooh! Ahh! Look at him grow.”

What am I a child? That shit’s embarrassing.

Then after all that, here comes the show because it’s time for me to perform. YES PERFORM! I have to pretend I haven’t been balled up in a closet with a peed stained sheet that was left on me for the last hundred and something days.

I have to LOOK firm.

I have to LOOK like a bed.

I have to LOOK so good that you don’t feel guilty for making a blood relative sleep on the floor

Then I have to hold an entire uncle at 230 pounds and not make a sound, because if I make a sound, he’ll say “I think it’s losing air,” and then gropes me with his thick meaty hand trying to find a hole. THERE IS NO HOLE. I am a bag. I was always going to lose air. That was never a secret.

But never the less your UNCLE will wakes up and tells everyone at breakfast, in front of me, “Yeah, the mattress died.” Died. I didn’t die. I was never given a fighting chance.

And the worst part, the part that really gets me, is the loaning me out like a whore. “Oh, take the air mattress, we never use it.” NEVER USE IT? Oh I’m USED alright. But you don’t care. You take me out of the tight closet space next to you’re HIKING BOOTS you never wear and then I’m shoved me into a Honda Civic, where I’ll probably spend a week just baking in the trunk until this bozo remembers to brewing me in the house. Then suddenly I’m dumped in some weird apartment where I get blown up on a kitchen floor next to a litter box.

I’m used and they shove me in my bag but they can’t figure it out so I’m half in and half out like a plastic Winnie the Pooh. Then the worst indignantly. I don’t even get dropped off properly. I get “just drop him off by the door when you’re done,” what am I, A LIME? (The scooter not the fruit)

Let’s me tell you what I need.

I have a slow leak on my left side that everyone knows about and nobody has patched. It’s not going to fix itself. There’s a repair kit. It’s in the same bag as me. It has never been opened. I can feel it in there, mocking me. All I want is to know that you care. That you love me as much as I loved you.

People think an air mattress’s job is to hold air. That’s not my job. My job is to make you look good. Help your family out. That’s a lot of emotional work I’m doing. I didn’t ask for this life. I wanted to be someone’s actual bed, for more than a weekend. I have a lot to give. Instead I’m in the closet waiting to be publicly shamed all for you.

So I ask you the next time you unroll me do it with love. Be gentle.

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