a moment in the day: mattress

We're lying in bed. We've been watching our show, having our usual late dinner, and the credit music is rolling and soon it's time to go to sleep.

He says, "I'm a little nervous about the new mattress coming tomorrow."

"You mean because it might be too difficult to get set up or it might not turn out to be what you want?"

"You know, I've had this mattress for thirty years," he says. "I think since I was living in my grandmother's house."

I remember it there. When I visited him that one time before we were married. When he made me dinner and we sat on the bed and ate profiteroles.

He picks up his dish and takes it out of the room, to the kitchen, to rinse it. I lie back and close my eyes. I can picture lying in this bed in our old apartment. The little TV in the corner with the bay window behind. How we used to call it the tree house because through all the windows in that corner you could see nothing but branches and leaves.

I try to feel Nicholas lying on the mattress next to me. Stephen breaks the spell as he comes back into the bedroom. 

I feel so suddenly sad and I don't know why. It's strange to feel sad about losing a mattress. When losing it doesn't erase the stories that happened there, when it's not even the whole bed. Maybe it's not loss I'm feeling but some sort of deep nostalgia. I just know that when I lay back a moment ago and closed my eyes, I felt like I was there in that old place. Could really feel it. Which is something for me because I don't tend to remember things vividly. It was a little dream of a place, wasn't it? Too small, but those bay windows and the stacks of old movie DVDs we used to watch and the Christmas lights strung across the edge of the ceiling.

I wasn't able to fully conjure Nicholas though. I think I only pictured him there from photos we have of him somewhere, lounging reluctantly close to Kitty. No, that wasn't even Nicholas, was it? The little Chihuahua in those photos was José. My memories are all bunched up together and suddenly feel far away.

I think when I tried to picture Nicholas just now, I didn't know where I should put him in the scene. On the pillow beside my head, maybe, or under the covers by my waist, in the crook of my arm, warm and breathing.