Marriage! Or...Taking Sides

There's always some new thing to argue over when you’re married.

A month ago Old Dave made me switch sides on the bed and he  took the good side.  ‘Course I admit I made him change the room all around that very morning, which is why he took my good side: to punish me.

It was nice to win the room-arranging fight. Very satisfying indeed.

Only now here he is on what was once MY perfectly taut side of the bed.

And here I am on his side, trying to get to sleep inside the virtual trough made by his body with its ropey muscles and heavy scaffolding. (My side, I should say, has this super-shallow almost undetectable dip that really I can’t take any credit for; it’s the porous bird-bones I was talking about the other day.)

Anyway it feels pretty strange, and not just because of the trough.

It feels strange because the room looks so different when I open my eyes: the window that used to be above the bed is now across from it and I now have to reach to the right instead of to the left for that glass of water I keep on the bedside table.  I feel like we turned the place over to new people who changed it all around, only we’re the new people.

He’s used to turning to the right - away from me - when he settles into the night’s deepest sleep only now he can’t because a turn to the right brings him in contact with the whole Argentina-long country of another body: mine.

When he did this last night it startled me awake because here he suddenly was, right on the set of the action adventure dream I was having.

It woke me right up.  “What‘s happening?” was all I could think.  Was he about to heave one of those 50-pound legs across my wicker breadbasket of a pelvis?

“Dave! I’m right here!” I said from my trough, meaning Don’t steamroll me.

He opened one eye and gave me that wry look he sometimes puts on. “Thanks T.” he said. “I feel so safe!”

You could die from such a man, you know?

see that trough? You could water your horse in it!