four beds i’ve lived in 

a Disney princess bed 

the first bed i can remember wasn't a cot or a crib—whatever you’re supposed to call them—but it had half-rails. while i have very few memories of this bed, i know it fascinated me as a child and it held plenty of bad dreams. it was made of wood and had cut-out painted faces of princesses to watch me sleep. i can only remember one or two and can’t find it anywhere online now that i’m an adult—the internet shows me fancy carriage-shaped beds or ones with fluffy, pink canopies, and i know we never had that in our home.

i remember this bed less for the bed itself and more so for the home surrounding it. i shared that room with an older girl. i can’t remember how much older and i frankly can’t remember what she looked like either. i think she was blonde. she was one of a pair of siblings, not my siblings of course but sometimes it felt like they were. 

the house was small and our bedroom was next door to her brothers’, and then the parents’. i say the because my mother was only dating their father and it didn’t last much longer than a year anyway. 

i don’t have many memories of that home and i don’t wish to either. just fuzzy segments that try to fit together and never do. i’ve always found puzzles frustrating.  

sometimes i dream of that house. i don’t remember the layout but i can scrape together the image of a few toys—robot guinea pigs on a castle track, begging my not-brother for a turn on the wooden cross go-cart he’d ride down the driveway with friends. even rarer do i pick up moments; falling off the porch steps on roller skates, getting my finger caught in a tri-fold door to the bathroom and wailing for ages until I could get it free, skinning my pinkie with a potato peeler trying to skin an apple, walking into the kitchen one day and the world suddenly tilting into a blurred upside-down realm that doubled at the fogged centres.  (when i came to have my first pair of many glasses, i was disappointed and shocked to find i did not have two mothers.)  

even more often my dreams are filled with things that i know didn’t happen. i’d wake up in that bed, it’d be dark, and c would be out of the room and sleeping with her father, like always. i’d stare at the ceiling for a long time unable to move much, gripping the guard rails. (why don’t more adults have guard rails on their beds? even if it weren’t for safety, it’d be fun if nothing else.) when i’d look down there’d be glass on my bedcovers, sparkling across some cartoon princess’s face. but it couldn’t have happened in real life because the front door was down the hall and around the corner from our bedroom, just between the living room and the dining room. mum couldn’t have tracked it into my room, she would have been too cautious about it. too busy cleaning it after he demanded her to, even when she needed a doctor and it was all his fault anyway.  

i don’t trust my memories very often, and i don’t really want to. dreams and memories are very close to the same thing, and neither are very reliable.  

our shared caravan bed 

the bed after we moved from that house was one large bed in a caravan. we had run away with barely anything left. after spending a little while with my grandparents, we moved into a caravan park. there wasn’t much room for the bed, and i was only four or five then so i can’t even remember if it was really a bed or just a mattress on the floor. but i’ve since realised that caravans are a lot more sophisticated than i thought at that age, so it might’ve been nice.  

i shared it with mum; every night we’d huddle close under an insanely warm tiger blanket with a stuffed satin trim. tigers, wolves, or dragons. some of mum’s favourite things. if i said that anything interesting happened there, i would be lying. i can’t remember much at all except for that blanket, and that i missed having a real home.  

the black iron bed 

i had this bed throughout the entirety of the time we spent in the home after the caravan. it had a wrought iron frame with wooden end pieces. it felt grown-up at the time but it was only a single bed. it was tucked into the small room next to mum’s and what had been my playroom, over a ventilation hatch and under a nest of pigeons in the ceiling. they gave me so many infections during that time that i still avoid them now. 

i had this one for a very long time, we even brought it with us to the new house after the lounge room roof caved in and we gave up on that neighbourhood. we had wanted to move for ages, so i was thrilled when i was told we were leaving in the middle of the primary school yard. 

when we moved we placed it in the middle of the wall, because i had read somewhere that that’s what grown-ups did. children had their beds in corners. it didn’t make much sense but it matched a trend so i was almost proud of the idea. even with Dora the Explorer blankets and bedsheets, i felt older than i was. i spent many nights leaving that bed to sleep in my mum’s room. it was always the safer choice.  

at some point in our new house—it wasn’t very new then, and nor was it any good—i had been crying on my bed alone. i can’t remember what about, but i had plenty of things to cry about at that time. had someone died? was someone sick? was it later in my memory, when i had just started being bullied? or even further still, my first rejection and i had sat on my bed sobbing while assuring her there would be no resentment between us.  

mum came in and sat beside me;, she always hated it when i cried, in the way i think all good mothers do. but we’d been too close in the centre of what was an admittedly shitty bed and the frame cracked down the middle, the slats popping out of the frame and splintering. mum’s bed does the same even now and it’s always a bit of a laugh when we have to pop them back into place. 

even crying my eyes out, we had a good laugh over my broken bed. it made me feel somewhat better. are all people just hardwired to feel better after destroying something? is that why rage rooms are such a popular thing now? or is it really niche and i’ve just spent too much time thinking about them? i’d like to imagine being in one—dressed in a white safety suit and given a baseball bat or weapon of some sort—and letting loose into a room of windowpanes, old computer monitors, phones and furniture to smash. 

a therapist at my high school tried that in year 12. she wasn’t really a therapist, but as close as a public school could afford. one of the only teachers i liked referred her to me, so i decided to give it a shot. she let me throw bean bags and scrunched paper balls at the walls and whiteboards, brought them back to me like we were playing fetch so i wouldn’t have to break my stride. one throw. another. a couple seconds. reload. again. i loved it. she was one of the only counsellors that actually helped. i saw her twice that year and decided i didn’t need her anymore. 

my white wooden bed 

this is the bed i still have today, and i’ll probably have it for a good many years. queen-sized, with sheets covered in anything from dot paintings to deep blue. i’ve stuck two wooden slats to the headboard, novelty decorations that my mother bought—the usual cheesiness, cow puns with figurines and ‘home is where the heart is’ shenanigans.  

the mattress is so tall my tiny dog cannot jump on it. so she sits and barks and paws at the frame until i climb out of a pile of stuffed animals to pick her up and tuck her in. and yes, i still sleep with stuffed animals. too many, some might say. it gives the illusion of a small space to fit into, when really everything has kept growing with me.  

oh, i could die in this bed. not because it’s particularly comfortable or luxurious—definitely expensive though—but because it has held me through more things than i can count. where i came to terms with ‘relationships’ that weren’t really relationships. letting the cat dirty my sheets again because she’s too old and sweet to be angry at when she’s sick. where i sat and read game of thrones—such a strange book. fucked up. 

i’ve had four beds in my life but it feels like i’ve only had one. do all people look at their beds and think it must be the same one from their infancy but bigger? hacked away at until it becomes something adult and almost boring in contrast to car beds and canopies, devoid of colour and softness. it stops feeling like an old friend. or maybe we are just so blasé when it comes to our beds.  

does everyone have an imagination when they go window shopping in a furniture store? see every bed as theirs? i seem to always do it, take the obligatory lie down in the set-up beds and imagine it in my bedroom corner. such a deep-rooted selfishness. am i selfish? maybe, i can’t remember a whole lot of times where i’d been overly selfish and only a few more when i’d been selfless. it might just be vain to describe oneself as selfless or good.  

i look at the bed in natasha matilda-smith’s work. ‘if i die, please delete my soundcloud’. yes, sure, i’ll do that for you. but in the meantime, i want to climb into the empty space in the bed left between one faceless body and the laptop. the room is so white and yet so pink in the reflection that it’s hard to not want to insert something there. a bit of colour, perhaps a person. to give it a life. she might be dead in there; does she move much in the video they played on that bed in the exhibition? i can’t remember, i only remember being uncomfortable watching her and not doing much of anything else.  

if i lay there, maybe i’d rot too. humans are such social creatures that maybe it’d be a mercy not to rot there alone.  

rot. rotian. moral corruption. (old english root)

god, i’d let anyone judge me for a moment to lay down. i’d die in that bed and let someone be my voyeur like i had been hers. it would all be worth it, i think, or perhaps just a fitting end to a never-ending loop of never quite knowing if i’m alive. 

in a pink room. i used to hate pink, i thought it was girly. performative. i don’t anymore. is that poetic? it must feel poetic, at least a little bit. the walls so pink i think about something human, organic, like crawling back into the womb. maybe that’s what it feels like to die, returning to your mother; it would probably be more comfortable this way. i probably wouldn’t hate the idea of dying if this was how it was guaranteed to be. do i loathe the idea of dying, though? 

i stir. i sit. it’s so grey in my room it must be early morning. but when i check, it’s late, as it always is. so, so late. so lazy. i kick back the covers. do it all again.