I Have Learned Not To Question The Pillows

There Are Fourteen Of Them

We have fourteen pillows on our bed.

One is mine. One my wife’s. Functional. For sleeping.

The other twelve exist for reasons I’ve never been fully able to establish and have learned not to question.

I want to be clear, I didn’t buy these pillows.

I’ve never bought a decorative pillow in my life. I wouldn’t know where to start.

I can’t ever remember knowing that decorative pillows were a category of thing that existed until they began arriving in our bedroom one by one over a period of time.

None of this is accidental. There is a logic to it. But not logic I can access.

The Nightly Removal

Every night before bed the pillows have to come off.

This is not optional. You cannot sleep under or on fourteen pillows. You cannot get into a bed occupied by fourteen pillows without first relocating them to somewhere else.

So every night I remove twelve pillows from the bed and place them on the chair in the corner. I’ve yet to be given the reason why this falls to me.

They don’t stack. They don’t cooperate. Several of them are different sizes and shapes.

There are cylindrical ones, small square ones, one that is inexplicably the size of a dinner plate, and they have to be moved individually with the care of a man handling objects he fundamentally doesn’t understand.

Then I can get into bed.

The Morning Reinstatement

Every morning the pillows go back on the bed.

All twelve of them. In a specific arrangement. There is a correct order and a correct position and a correct orientation for each pillow and I have learned these things the way you learn anything in a long marriage. Through tuts and pointed corrections and of course the look.

The cylindrical one goes at the back. The small square ones go in front of it. The dinner plate one. I don’t know what it’s called.

I’ve started thinking of it as Gerald. Gerald goes slightly off-centre to the left.

I do this every morning.

The Asking

I asked once what the pillows were for.

The answer was that they make the bed look nice.

I’ve thought about this answer for a long time.

The bed looks nice for approximately fourteen hours a day. The hours between when it gets made in the morning and when we dismantle it again at night.

In between there’s nobody is in the bedroom.

We are downstairs. Living our lives. Unaware of how nice the bed looks.

The pillows are performing for an empty room.

I reinstated Gerald this morning at 7:15 AM.

Gerald has an audience of zero.

Fourteen pillows, twelve somehow seem to be my responsibility every morning and night for the rest of my life.

I can’t say I even like Gerald.

But every morning there he is. Slightly off-centre to the left.

Apparently, exactly where he belongs.