Going to bed

{via}

Prompt from The Isolation Journals - Suleika Jaouad's weekly newsletter

Write about all the beds you've ever slept in - the beds that felt like home, those that felt like hell, the beds you can barely remember and those you'll never forget. What memories float up? How did you feel in different beds? And what beds do you hope to sleep in one day? 

I'll begin with sleep - here's a map. 

I spent childhood and early adolescence in "Let Me Be Awake As Long As I Like, Please" Land. (LMBAALAILPL to the initiated). My parents, whether unknowingly replicating the rhythms of their own childhood or preemptively exhausted at the prospect of battling their strong-willed children, rarely enforced strict bedtimes. We had a rough time around which we went to bed, yes, but for the most part, my wishes as an inhabitant of LMBAALAILPL were largely respected. 

From the ages of twelve to fourteen, I had a period where I caved to my growing, gangly body's demands for extra sleep, going to bed early and rising relatively late. (Although never late enough to miss the good Saturday morning cartoons.) Adolescence asked me to wave its flag and I did so proudly, swimming sleepily into weekend mornings. 

The early months of fourteen, however, necessitated a move out of these languorous waters. I was in high school by this point, and studies and social pressures were starting to get serious. I needed more time to keep up with the demands of homework and exam prep, yes, but more pressingly, I had entered the realm of Performative Sleep Deprivation. This realm, known to all high school overachievers, required a shibboleth from would-be entrants: to state and sometimes prove how little sleep you were getting in pursuit of academic excellence. I remember looking at a questionnaire with my friend, Shani, in which we were asked how many hours of sleep we tended to get each night. Shani and I both looked at each other in a faux-shy way and circled 4-5 hours, (not so) humbly shrugging our shoulders at our dedication to the realm. I expressed horror when my friend, Lillie, admitted that she got eight hours of sleep each night; could she really be committed with that kind of excess of rest? 

During university and my early working life, I moved into the land of Healthy Sleep Rhythms. Following Lillie's lead, I started to get eight hours of sleep a night, and experienced the delightful reality of moving through the world without lethargy in my limbs. Those were technicolour days. 

In the last three years, I've departed from Healthy Sleep Rhythms, opting for the neighbouring country of Sporadic Good Rest. When I feel on top of work, I tend to rest well - reading before bed, waking at my preferred hour to tackle the day. When I am overwhelmed by work, sleep is one of the first things to go. I crawl into bed after staring at my laptop for hours on end, trying to manage the fire hydrant flow of tasks that is flowing in my direction. It's not all bad in Sporadic Good Rest. There are some days where I feel like a complete human. Some. I've been here a while, though, and have begun contemplating a move... 

Now that I've thoroughly charted my relationship with sleep, what does any of this have to do with beds, you ask? Very little. As I've been writing this, I've become aware of how disentangled the concept of sleep is from the tangible reality of beds in my life. My quality of sleep has almost had nothing to do with the bed I'm sleeping in and everything to do with the state of my mind at a given point in time. Nevertheless, this prompt is about beds and to beds I will now turn. 

***

A bed of one's own is hard to come by in Malaysia. Beds are shared with parents and siblings well into the teenage years, sometimes due to a lack of funds, sometimes due to social norms in need of revision. I spent the first five years of my life alternating between a cot, a pai-i (bamboo sleeping mat) on the floor, and my parents' bed. I can recollect very little about these early years, except, perhaps, a lingering sense memory of the coolness of the floor underneath my pai-i. 

I have no memories of the bed(s) I occupied in Otautau, the farming town we lived in when we first moved to New Zealand. Hazy outlines of the living room remain, but the bedroom has been wiped from my mind. Six months later, however, we moved to Edendale, another small Southland town, and I have clear memories of mattresses placed on the floor in one of the back bedrooms, a scandalously unguarded gas heater in the corner our source of warmth. I remember early mornings huddled together with my mum and brother (my dad had already left for work) watching This is Your Day with Benny Hinn on the box TV. Despite the humble furnishings of that room, the beds were warm and I slept soundly, surrounded by the people I loved. 

In Invercargill, my brother and I continued to sleep in our parents' room, sharing a double bed that was more than enough to accommodate our little bodies. We spent cosy winter nights in the largest bedroom, no doubt keeping our parents up longer than they would have preferred. My eighth year bought with it a bed of my own, or, sort of. It was a bunk bed shared with my brother, but we moved to an entirely different room to sleep in it. I don't remember what it was like to have my own bed for the first time. All I remember was that my dad would come in to the room to tell us a "quick" bedtime story and inevitably wind up lying down in the bottom bunk in response to our pleas for greater length and volume in the stories. 

Age nine brought with it a milestone move to my own bedroom with its own double bed. This was bliss for an introverted child yearning for space. Of course, my parents were always entitled to come into my room and my youngest brother in particular would toddle in and out, always bypassing his own plentiful toys and reaching for plugs, breakables and small inedible things to eat. Nevertheless, my room and bed were my own in which to dream both waking and sleeping dreams. 

At age 12, I moved to Christchurch and slept in a single bed in the room closest to my parents. Within a couple of years, I had moved to the slightly bigger bedroom which housed my own double bed once more. The beds in Christchurch are those I remember the most, not because of their comfort or discomfort (although I did have a particularly plush double bed towards the end of my time there), but because they were beds in which I yearned for escape. I spent my last six years in Christchurch longing to be anywhere but there. I wanted to be in Auckland, or London, Or Vancouver. Those dreams would come true eventually, but my double bed was the place where I first really began to cultivate hopes and later a way out of my stifled Christchurch life. 

My great escape came, at least temporarily, through an exchange to UBC in Vancouver in 2017. I left for exchange early to travel through the Rockies and Vancouver Island with a handful of other exchange students I had met on the Internet. Over these few weeks I returned to the bunk bed, a hostel staple,  sometimes shared with a friend, other times a stranger who I was careful not to wake as I climbed up creaky ladders in the dark. These were beds I slept in soundly, happily tired from a day of hiking. 

Perhaps the happiest bed I've slept in was my king single (twin?) in Vancouver, on the sixteenth floor of the Walter Gage Apartments at UBC. The view from my room was so breathtaking in all conditions that for the first few months, I didn't close the curtains, not wanting to miss the gradations of light and weather that were framed by my window. I fell asleep to stars piercing the dark and awoke to the sun piercing the day. The bed was large enough to fit my body and my expansive happiness which only grew the more time I spent in Vancouver. One night, my friend, Jess, squeezed in there with me and the bed was up to the task of accommodating her and her happiness, too, the two of us sleeping soundly back to back.

***

A decade after my family's move to Christchurch, I finally left for good and moved to Auckland with Lillie. We hauled our suitcases and newly-purchased Warehouse furniture into a shoebox apartment on Hobson Street. I lost the coin toss for the bedroom with the window, so I found myself in the "bedroom" (not technically allowed to be called a bedroom) next to the kitchen, with a luxurious sliding door for privacy. The "bedroom" came with a queen bed that filled 92% of the room, and I got used to sidling in and out of the room with dainty moves. Nevertheless, the room was warm, the bed was comfortable and I was starry-eyed about everything in Auckland that year. I slept well on my borrowed bed in my tiny room on Hobson Street. 

In 2020, I moved out of the shoebox and into my beloved Big House in Mount Albert. For the first few months, I barely utilised my new i-furniture bed, coming home from a full day of work to sit at my desk and finish the references on my thesis long into the night. When I did sleep, it was the deep slumber of the over-exhausted. I was counting down the days until March when my thesis would be handed in and I would be able to emerge from my little back room to get to know my new flatmates. One of them later admitted to me that she was suspicious of both my social skills and culinary abilities in those early weeks, given that in the brief periods that I did emerge from my room, it was only to engage in small talk and make myself a bowl of instant mi-goreng. I eventually did emerge for reasons beyond the barest of talk and nutritionally-suspect meals, and I found myself delighting in the company of my new, clever flatmates. At night, I would return to my cushy bed nourished and ready for rest. 

That i-furniture bed - the first I've ever purchased and owned - has been one in which I've had both the soundest and worst sleeps of my life. Sound sleeps came after days spent walking and talking with friends and leisurely reading sessions that lasted until I was squinting at the pages. Little sleep came in the wake of conflict, money concerns and the usual ongoing, lifelong heartaches. I have hauled this heavy mattress into four different houses now - the Big House, the House that Shall Not Be Named, The Little House and now this house, as yet unnamed, where I will live until November. 

***

I find it hard to think about beds and the future. When I purchased a bed of my own, I made it a queen because I associated the size with adulthood. Regardless of whether I was single or married, I thought, I had the right to a larger-than-single bed. Also implicit in this purchase, however, was the hope that I might someday share the bed with another. This feels more and more improbable by the day, and I am considering swapping out my queen for a single come November. Regardless of what happens in November, and how this particular dream feels like it has faded, I am hopeful that beds to come will be ones in which I dream other dreams, both waking and sleeping.