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Tbrady

Tracy McArdle is the author of Confessions of a Nervous Shiksa and Real Women Eat Beef. She spent twelve years in New York and Los Angeles as a publicity executive at such companies as Turner Broadcasting, Twentieth Century Fox and Sony Pictures Entertainment before moving home to New England to wr...

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Hideous Confession

Tracy McArdle

It has happened.  I’ve only been married two years…and I have become obsessed with another.  And I have had this other.  Repeatedly.  Constantly.  I am committed as one consumed by dementia.  My passion knows no limits, my hunger remains unsatisfied.  

I am in love with my bed.

I dream of it when we are not together.  Like a pimply teenager on the cusp of hormonal greatness, I fantasize, I count the minutes until our next assignation, I yearn desperately, fiercely for more of the affair. While driving in traffic I feel the burn of our two halves uniting.  I long for the evenings I slip away, my husband blessedly distracted in his own rituals.  No one knows.  

I am in love with my bed.

I do not know when we first discovered each other.  Sure, we were acquaintances; we saw each other daily in the course of our own routines.  Perhaps we had always taken the relationship for granted.  The fixation came upon me slowly, then overtook my very being, devouring me like a fever.  Had I never noticed the softness, the inexplicable and unconditional comfort my bed provided, night after night, lonely morning after lonely morning?  The delicious sheets and pillows, warm blankets and fluffy throws, all blended into one rollicking tangle of deep relaxation and satisfaction?  The lust I had never known!  How had I overlooked the dizzying escape that our union provided?  I could stay forever, I thought, and it became a dangerous habit.  When we parted it was like being torn in half.

Each morning as my eyes open to the cruel daylight, I bound from my bed and make it - quickly, efficiently; straightening its comforter, flattening the sheets, fluffing and positioning its pillows.  Sometimes I slap the mattress, though I know it is cruel.  I do this not because I am obsessive compulsive but because if I don’t make my bed immediately, I will simply get back in.  And stay.  And stay….I must turn my head from its whimpers of protest, its cries for me to return to its haven of desire realized.

Instead, I murmur to its silky creases and depths….Ah….there are but sixteen hours between us my darling!  And I rush to my husband’s side at the breakfast table.

Sometimes, we risk being together during the day.   If I am “working at home” and my husband is away with obligations, I creep to the top of the stairs and open the bedroom door.  My lover’s joy is palpable as I rip the comforter from its body and plunge myself into its trembling core ….and hour goes by, maybe more….and the phone rings, or the dog barks, or guilt washes over me at the incredible number of dishes in the sink.

I smooth the covers, pat the innocence back into the pillows, and go about my day…dreaming of our next reunion.

Once we were almost discovered.  A neighbor knocked, carrying a Fedex package meant for me.  My car was in the driveway; of course she thought me home, a dutiful wife, perhaps making stew for dinner.  I rushed from the room, creases covering my cheek and forehead, mascara scandalously smudged, drool pool recently dried on my chin.  I tried to smooth out my cheeks, arrange my hair, but the door opened and -- it was too late.  I saw the disgust on her face, the envious disapproval in her eyes.  Would she tell?  

The event shook me and I stayed away for almost ten hours after that.  But it is an affair I cannot end.  I have no solution.  It only grows worse.

I am in love with my bed.

I just had to tell someone.