I’m two days (and nights) into sleeping on a futon mattress on top of my old, severely dented mattress. This has been a learning experience that has left me not only a little loopy for reasons I’ll speculate on later, but that has me thinking about just how easy it might be to detect a pea beneath twenty mattresses, if those mattresses are thin, old, or scrungly enough. On one hand, I’ve learned that there are many types of back pain, some of which you might only feel as you slowly recover from worse pain. On the other hand, now I know what it means to climb into bed as an adult. And how my last partner felt every time we both stayed at my place. I mean, it’s not like my current pillow-topped mattress was particularly low (the perfect height for me to settle back on without needing to really bend at the knees, but now my bed surface is above waist-height on me (I’m six-foot-three, for reference) so I have to actually CLIMB onto it’s weirdly spongy surface. Sure, neither mattress feels like that on their own, but the weird way that pressure settles through the futon mattress into the foam-topped spring mattress beneath makes it all feel like an old, damp, slightly mildewy piece of memory foam that springs back instantly. It’s mildly upsetting to touch with my hands, but the sensation disappears once I’ve got most of myself into the bed, so I only have to put up with it for a few seconds at most as I clamber.

All-in-all, I’ll take what I can get. You’re reading this as I’m two days away from getting my new mattress, but I’m writing this with another nine days to go, which means I’m struggling to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Which makes it sound worse than it probably is, but I’m so tired. I’m not entirely sure this is the case [now, as I’m editing this post one day before it goes up, I am POSITIVE this was the case] since I FEEL better than I did even forty-eight hours ago, but I think the cumulative exhaustion of the past month of increasingly poor sleep (which includes both of the “slept too little because I was uncomfortable/dreading bed” and the “what sleep I got was low-quality due to sleep conditions” varieties) has caught up to me now that I don’t need to continue enduring it. Since my body recognizes that the horrible stressful period of my life is over, it now lets me feel everything it has been helping me ignore. All the pains, the aches, and the total exhaustion has come crashing down on me which, today, meant that I slept through all of my alarms, fell asleep twice while trying to become coherent enough to sit up and get out of bed, and got to work at almost eleven in the morning rather than my normal nine. I feel so out of it today that I’ve basically written the entire week off as a likely-loopy recovery period [and I was right to do so].

I’m not sure how much of anything I’ll get done this week. I tried to play video games and write down some interesting or coherent thoughts about them for my book club, but I never launched the game, wound up disassociating for about ten minutes, writing a bit of poetry about that disassociation, and then finally starting to write something about the Dailish Elf mission set in Dragon Age Origins. Turns out that I was having trouble following my train of thought because I was so relieved to find a story in the game that had something to say beyond describing the situation unfolding that I overlooked the fact that what it had to say was absolute bullshit that I vehemently disagreed with due to personal experiences that touch on my childhood trauma. Which wound up being a MUCH more fertile ground for thoughtful analysis than the incredibly watery “vengeance is a curse on everyone involved” bunk that I was trying to spin up. At least I figured out why I never liked that quest line and why I have such disdain for bald male elves in Dragon Age. Turns out I didn’t just think Solas was a little weird, I also incredibly disliked his stylistic precursor, Keeper Zathrian, which poisoned me against him before I even met him. After all, they’re both baby-looking, eggheaded, bald male elves with an initially well-hidden connection to some kind of wolf-something (which is a LOT to have in common with someone two games away from you and yet have no further connection), so how could I not link them in my mind?

Anyway, I’m really out of it, this post is a mess, and the important note to hit is that my experiments with alternate mattress formations have largely paid off since I’m not really in pain anymore and that alone might be relief enough to make me loopy. Nothing like eliminating a constant source of pain to make you really appreciate that sometimes a sore back can just be stretched away. I’m not sure how (or if) I’m going to make it through another nine nights of this, so I’m hoping that the slowly-approaching weekend will help me get enough rest that I can feel sane, embodied, and capable next week [it did, but just barely]. For now, though, I’m going to keep writing everything down so my thoughts don’t vanish into the ether the second I stop paying attention to them, avoiding heavy machinery at work for what should be incredibly obvious reasons at this point, and setting up additional alarms so I can actually wake up and get to work at a reasonable hour. I really don’t want to be there past eight in the evening any more than I already have this week…