Bedrooms
My Real Bedroom | Original Picture courtesy of Anett Martin Sosa
Pink stripes, 95% cotton, polka dots, and warm woods. My bedroom is charmed, and bursting at the seams with patchouli, wine, and magic. There are dolls on my top shelf, cameras I don’t use, and books I’ve read thrice stacked on laminate, hair-riddled wood.
The bedroom is where you really get to know someone. Not like that. But even more intimately. I want to know what you like, what you care about, what your favorite color is. What does your bed feel like? Mine is an Ultra-Soft Costco brand with a bamboo-fiber cooling topper. My bed has a built-in shelf, and Paradise Lost sits on top of it, untouched and bent. There are denim scraps on my floor. Tarot cards are spread across my bed, and pajamas stuffed under both my pillows. There is no TV in my bedroom, just a baby-blue Mac and an iPad—Facebook Feng Shui do’s and-don’ts infographics taught me to minimize major electronics in the bedroom, so I do.
I don’t let just anyone sleep here. The bed is where your energy collects.
The human spends about one-third of her life asleep. Maybe another third in her room. Existing, learning, feeling, not reading. “My room is my biggest organ,” says Instagram user12345666, and every other wide-eyed, homely beast. So, alive and unblinking, the bedroom waits with bated breath, and whispering humbleness, for the warmed weight of the body’s touch and caress.
Joan and Frankie on the Bed | Original Picture courtesy of Anett Martin Sosa
Everything important happens in the bedroom. I write my best work lying down. I close my eyes and Joan of Arc lies down next to me, cups her young hand around my ear, and whispers the truths of 100% cotton and the white-hot pyre. Sleep coats the ceiling and Mark Rothko’s sweeping blues stain my sheets. Lines loosely come together; punctuation-free, word-vomit essays like this flutter their lashes awake.Anaïs Nin, and Lavinia become more and more alive with every misspelling of their name. Even now, I lie here, East of Eden upon my chest and a MacAir at my knees, humming the hymns of bedroom noise.
Rain. Whispers. Breaths. Clicks. Clacks.
Dreams: the holy shepherds of the mind. Will-o’-wisps guiding the unconscious toward or away from form. Look down on your pillow and realize how much she holds. Carrying the weight of your head (and guests’) every night. Extracting the electricity and pink of your brain and keeping it filed away forevers ever. Here, today, I sit with paper and pen and pretend I’m not afraid. Afraid of an inanimate object that will know everything about me forever. The bed, the pillow.
Old Bedding | Original Picture courtesy of Anett Martin Sosa
Bedrooms. Physical, tangible expressions of what's inside you. Bedrooms, by nature, are steeped in the milk of self. Tell me about your bedroom, and I will tell you about mine.
Strike Out,
Anett Martin Sosa
Miami
A surrealist at heart, Ani Martin Sosa is a graduate student studying Women (& Monsters) in English Literature at FIU. She is a Joan of Arc enthusiast with an aversion to too serious people. On her Substack, Booksmart, she talks about whatever she wants.
Edited by Nico Gurdijian
