Cheap Twin Mattress

I really like the cheap twin mattress. Maybe it's because it's the first bed that I remember having, and the kind that I've had for most of my life. It's the one that I've jumped into in good times and bad. Maybe this makes it particularly comfortable for me to have one now. Like an old friend. Or a really big security blanket.

 

 
Maybe some people would think that I'm silly to regard a cheap twin mattress as something that gives me comfort. But it's just that from my earliest memories onward, it's been a constant. I haven't slept on the exact same one, but it was always a cheap twin mattress.

I can still remember the cheap twin mattress that I had when I was five years old. It was on a white frame with four posts and I usually covered it with pink, Barbie doll sheets. That was the bed that I spent my childhood in. It was what I would lay in as I wrote things in my diary. It was what my cousins and I would jump up and down on until Mom came in and told us to stop. It was what I would get tucked into every night by my dad.

When I was a teenager, my parents traded in that bed for something just a bit longer. It still had a cheap twin mattress, but I think they call those "extra long." I had given up on the Barbie sheets by then. I wanted something more adult since I was a teenager and all grown up, of course. It's funny to me now. That was the bed that I would talk on the phone for hours in. I would sit on it when my best friend forever came over, and we would exchange secrets. I told her about this boy that I loved so deeply back then. That was also the bed that I cried on when he broke my heart two years later.

When I went away to college, I decided to dorm. Everything was so exciting and new. It was a little scary too. I guess being hundreds of miles away from my parents and the town I grew up in did that. The cheap twin mattress that I had in that little room saw me through a lot of things as well. I studied a lot while sitting right there. I know, that makes me boring. I was sort of a bookworm in college. I guess I still am a bit. But I did also have my first taste of liquor there too. My roommate was wilder than I ever was, and she played bartender one night. What a crazy time that is for everybody. I guess that's what I look back on as the stretch of years when I became an adult.

So, if you ask me why I have such a fond memory of a certain kind of bed, that's my answer. It saw me through childhood into adulthood, good times and bad. My question to you is why wouldn't I?