Creative Nonfiction by Alexandria Peary
Mattress №1
Maybe the world can be subdivided into people who sleep in a bed and people who sleep on the floor as houseguests of their own lives. We won’t ignore people who sleep on couches, in chairs, at the desk, behind the counter, in a bathtub, in a hammock, on a cot, on a park bench, against a wall, on the job, in their cars, on a horse, or entire cultures where resting on mats on the ground is the norm, but let’s agree that a mattress on the floor is an important way to understand our humanity. It doesn’t matter if the mattress is plastic wrapped and tautly white or floppy and stained. A mattress on the floor puts us low to the ground when in our most vulnerable physical, psychological, or socio-economic state, while a bed frame of any style (pragmatism of a metal frame, substantial faith of a sleigh bed, or romanticism of a canopy bed) suspends us inside a parenthesis, two or three feet off the ground, almost like the first months of life. The difference between sleeping on the floor or in a bed is equivalent to deciding between living out the rest of our days in a cellar or attic.
Mattress №6
Consider the magnetized floating bed, at a price tag of $1.6 million, featured on the same website as a gold-plated yacht and a $5,000 hamburger, and suspended off the floor by a system of magnets. The bed can sustain up to 1,500 pounds, is the color of an obelisk, so it’s like lying down on a sacrificial altar. Or think of those who have lost their freedom, temporarily or for the long term, hospitalized or incarcerated, forced to sleep on an industrial mattress, like the anti-suicide mattress (suicide resistant, actually, a 3-ply military grade exterior material that won’t rip even if punctured, available with or without pillow) sold by an industrial supplies company with the tag line “Jail Supplies Made Simple.” Futons are a compromise, an in-between state. On the floor, a person with only a mattress is exposed to the uncontrollable, and the shapes of the unconscious might crawl over them as they sleep, a herd of minor threats and ambiguities. With a bunk bed or loft, we might fall from high experience, that place of ambition and competitive lightning, and in our recidivism to the normal lose our membership to the special.
Mattress №13
Until fairly late in the game, I was a person who slept on a mattress on the floor. I slept on the floor in Iowa City, Iowa; Amherst, MA; Northampton, MA; Sidney, ME; and Baton Rouge, LA, in rented rooms in boarding houses, in landlord-white studios and one-bedrooms in humorless apartment complexes with popcorn ceilings, on Berber carpet or scuffed wooden floors. In my twenties and early thirties, I moved around for a series of graduate schools and low-paying teaching gigs, and like most of my peers, I lived with a mish-mash from thrift stores or found curbside. The Jay Gatsby-like graduate student in a bow tie who owned a china cabinet of knickknacks from Korea, where he’d taught English, or the trust fund poet with her ancestral dining room set stood outside the norm. Living with high turn-over roommates in apartments furnished by dumpster diving, I missed the knick knacks polished with Windex and chairs rubbed down with lemon scented Pledge of my bootstraps child-of-immigrant upbringing. I had first dreamed up becoming a poet, a romantic notion, while lying between the plastic white spires of a canopy bed. In pursuing this career, I was drifting too far from my mother’s dotted line trajectory across the ocean from her bombed-out childhood to a lower-middle class life of respectable furniture. After all that expensive education paid for by her parents’ long hours at a convenience store, how could a daughter think of making a living off of line breaks and poems, of not owning a bed? As a decade passed, the canopy bed I paddled became a mattress on the floor, while our raised ranch disappeared over the horizon of the sea of bad odds.\
Mattress №27
For years, I slept on secondhand mattresses, left behind or donated. A landlord in Baton Rouge sold me my final used mattress. He offered me my pick of patio furniture, couches, and mattresses abandoned by previous tenants from his sprawling apartment complex near the university. During the drive to his storage facility, apropos of nothing the landlord removed a clunky Super Bowl ring from his finger and handed it to me. I bought a lumpy king-sized mattress from him, along with a mismatched patio set that functioned as my kitchen table and chairs, a sagging plaid loveseat, metal school desk, and wooden chair to hold my small television set. After a dead man named Rat was dumped below my bedroom window as I slept on that mattress on the floor, I moved out of this $90/month apartment to a place a few blocks over, but five months later, left the mattress on the curb and drove back to New England, all my belongings in the back of the car.
Mattress №42
The last thing on someone’s mind who rides a Greyhound bus to their newest location or mails ahead three boxes of their belongings is a mattress, let alone box springs or a bed frame. It’s almost as unthinkable as asking a renter to provide their own fridge or stove. This might be why so many mattresses lean on curbs or against dumpsters at the start and end of a month, their quilted fabric stained with embarrassing blooms. Unlike other cast-offs, mattresses almost never bear a FREE sign. In Munich this summer, I walked two times by Tatianna Trouvé’s sculpture (“Waterfall” 2013) of an abandoned mattress before I realized it wasn’t an actual mattress. This bronze, single-sized mattress is flung over a concrete plinth in front of a cemetery wall, dripping water from several small holes at the bottom as though it really was a discarded mattress left out in heavy rain. In dimmer hours, the metal mattress was the color of human excrement on a sidewalk. The fountain mattress fit perfectly into its environment, a rare trashy place in the German city, graffiti on the cemetery wall and litter pushed into the unweeded corner.
Mattress №78
According to the Mattress Disposal Task Force of the International Sleep Products Association, 4.5 million mattresses are dismissed each year to incinerators and landfills in the United States. To think of how many mattresses are rotting underground, how many slabs of sleep have sunk to that level, forming a human-made tectonic plate. Apparently, we’re improving with our mattress disposals: 95% of a typical mattress is recyclable and as of 2017, mattress recycling has increased 30%, with 56 facilities specifically for recycling mattresses in North America. Some disposals are the result of an upgrade in sleep technology — better alignment, better (memory) foam, more (inner) springs, (breathable) channels — but many of the mattresses left outdoors must be the result of transience that can’t afford a U-Haul.
Envoi, A Mattress
When a person remains too long a houseguest of their own lives, each evening is like eyeing an air mattress in the host’s spare room, calculating whether a good night’s sleep is in store. A mattress on the floor can also evoke a fresh start — the days after signing a lease and before we become familiar with the way the faucets work, how sunlight squares the kitchen window. A legit bed frame to come. The mattress on the floor can summon the people left behind in the relocation like houseplants and cooking ware. The mattress is a reminder that you are in a place where you’ve yet to memorize the zip code. Then the mattress on the floor becomes a raft. It’s piled high with the dotted-line figures of past or future friendships and loves, and it drifts from one landlord-white apartment to the next like an iceberg. It’s accompanied by the soprano of loneliness.
Alexandria Peary serves as Poet Laureate of New Hampshire and is a 2020 recipient of an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. She is the author of six books, including Control Bird Alt Delete (University of Iowa Press 2014); Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing (Routledge 2018); and The Water Draft (Spuyten Duyvil 2019). Her creative nonfiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in the Gettysburg Review, Cimarron Review, New England Review, Meridian, The Chariton Review, Southern Humanities Review, Brick, and Hobart. She specializes in mindful writing. The topic of her 2019 TEDx talk, ‘How Mindfulness Can Transform the Way You Write,’ is available on YouTube.
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