ikea

My boyfriend and I try different mattresses at ikea. We test-sleep them. Every time we close our eyes, we start hearing a baby cooing or a couple discussing mattresses and we lose focus. A man in a half eastern european and half indian couple (him eastern european) enters the mattress section and he starts explaining to his girlfriend in a thick accent how the mattresses all have different mattress technologies. He’s kind of making half of it up and including things that he’s walk-reading on the signs of the different mattresses, including ours. Another couple starts arguing about the real difference between a back sleeper and a side sleeper.

It feels full circle to get a mattress for my boyfriend at ikea because i really feel that there’s something evil about the luxury mattress industry. I blame the fact that I dabbled in the world of luxury mattresses on my past corporate job and the strange behaviors that my trinet smoothbrained coworkers influenced me with. When you work at a company, sometimes there are company wide events with pizza and some weird italian salad and this is where the most demented consumer behaviors spread.

We go to the cafeteria and there are like 50 people there in all kinds of families. The cafeteria looks exactly like the ikeas where i grew up in scandinavia, it smells like democratic socialism and reminds me of how I would sit at the far end of the long tables at lunch and eat everyone’s leftovers at elementary school in addition to my own because I had this insane metabolism, back when my class mates called me The Onion because of how much I used to sweat in gym class. I look around at all the families who are at ikea today, building their lives at the same time as I’m building my life with my boyfriend.

While we eat we look at the skyline of wall street and talk about the different babies around us and what they’ll grow up to do, some of them look like future creative directors, some of them like future demolition contractors. I tell him about when i was just in the bathroom and i heard this toddler laughing a belly laugh from a different stall, making me smile. It made me think of how wild of a feeling it must be; after you make a child with someone (have a baby) - to then hear that child laugh, a laughter that could fill a bathroom with joy.

My boyfriend gets meatballs, he always gets them. But there’s no mashed potatoes left so they give him mac and cheese instead, so the whole plate is just flooded with three different kinds of sauces with meatballs swimming inside. It looks wrong. When my boyfriend doesn’t get the food he wants the way he wants it there is a stab in my heart and I feel a desire to make everything right again.

Earlier, after having sex in his car on a quiet street of red hook, we park the car on the IKEA lot. I make the jump out from his tall and large vehicle with my boots, my cheeks still red from being with him. The air is a bit colder now, feels like a spring evening. You can smell the ocean. I say something like, let’s go, let’s hurry up and go find you this mattress. And he says are you stressed and instead of saying no like usual I try saying yes. He asks what he can do and I just tell him that, it’s not the type of stress that goes away, I’m just stressed right now and it’s gonna be like this for a while and it has nothing to do with you and I’m sorry. And he smiles because I let him in, he grabs my face in the way that I like and we kiss.