the spring equinox arrived thursday morning at 6:47am and found me awake.
i know the exact time because i looked at my phone when the light came through the gap in the white sheers — the ones that were hanging here when we moved in, which have the specific transparency of a window treatment that was designed by someone who wanted the plausible deniability of having a curtain without the functional reality of one. it’s fine in november. in november, the light arrives at a civil angle and at a reasonable hour and does not have an agenda. march light, apparently, does not operate on the same terms. march light has been waiting on the other side of the equinox for six months and has a list.
what it found, at 6:47am in the bedroom of a managed-community apartment in a suburb i didn’t choose, was approximately the following:
a ceiling fan that is not connected to any switch we have been able to identify. we’ve tested all of them. the fan just exists, overhead, a static object in a room that could theoretically have a ceiling fan, doing nothing. julian theorizes there’s a switch in a closet somewhere. i have stopped responding to this theory.
a fitted sheet in the process of its signature move, which is the slow diagonal migration toward the corner closest to julian’s side of the bed, accomplished quietly over four to six hours of sleep until by morning the mattress corner has staged its escape and there is an inch of bare mattress showing at my lower right. i’ve been re-tucking it every morning for six weeks. this is not a solution. this is a relationship.
a nightstand lamp i described, in february, as a placeholder. which it is. it has been a placeholder for forty-seven days. a placeholder is technically a thing that occupies space while waiting to be replaced by the correct thing, which means i’ve been sleeping next to the promise of a better lamp rather than a lamp, and the promise has been letting itself go.
a comforter that came from the last apartment. i’m not going to say more about this except that it came from the last apartment and that apartment was in another city and that city was a place i had a different life in and the comforter is the only object from that entire chapter that is still in active daily service and i am aware that this is either meaningful or simply inertia and i am not currently prepared to determine which.
julian slept through all of this. he is constitutionally capable of sleeping through the equinox, through the light, through my audit of the audit of the room, through what i can only describe as a forty-minute interior monologue conducted at full volume entirely in my own head. at one point i looked at my phone to see if i had slept at all and ended up reading about the artemis ii rocket rolling to the launch pad — four people, around the moon, april — and then put the phone down and looked at the ceiling, which has nothing to add to any of this.
the thing about the bedroom is that it has no audience. the living room had the housewarming. the bathroom had the audit that became a project that became a brief. the dining table had the manifesto about paper plates. all of those rooms had a reason to perform — something external requiring the room to rise to the occasion. the bedroom just has us, and we are not externally motivated stakeholders. we just sleep here. and rooms that have no audience are the ones that accumulate the most neglect, because neglect requires a witness to feel bad about itself.
i have been ignoring this room because nobody would know. which is, if i’m being honest about it, the worst possible reason to let a room stay wrong.
the equinox came in at 6:47am. it found the bedroom in its factory settings.
we’ll have more to say about this on friday.
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