The timing is mind blowing. The weather's been crazy hot lately and that's known to attract ants, but it's been feeling like Satan's breath for a while now. But of all the days for ants to be all over the toilet, it had to be that day! The one day when I was going to practically take residence there.....My friend who lives right next to me found the source where ants were entering - the garage!
I went to bed that night feeling sick. I found myself slapping my face paranoid that ants were crawling all over me but just around my face. I guess that should've been a sign that it was more than just paranoid and actuality. I just brushed it off as a negative reaction to the bathroom experience. I wake up the next morning to find that the perimeter of my bed was surrounded with a swirl of ants like a freaking marching band! Why would they be all over the place and selectively around the perimeter of my bed??? What, did I smear honey all over my fingers and rub the corners of my bed thoroughly? It makes no sense!
It led me to chuck everything! I gave my bed to a friend who loves the generic tempur pedic mattress my ex gifted me after we had broken up. Two years after we broke up and practically playing Cupid for me and the next guy who also had a bromance with my ex, he bought me a mattress because he had a bad feeling that I would hurt myself on my breaking air mattress. It was such a sweet and generous gesture. It's like the ex gave it to me to encourage fucking the next guy. It didn't work out with him and then there was another guy. So this mattress has a lot of odd associations and unique history of my past.
I wasn't repulsed by it. But at that point, it made me realize how used up it's been and I was gravitating towards change, birth, reinvention, starting over, freshness. My mattress didn't represent any of that. It's a story of my past and it carries memories between the pores of the mattress. And now it was laced with filthy ants.
My bed platform is also a unique story and representation of my past, my friends, my persistence, the support my friends provide me with and the effort they put in for me, their dedication, their selflessness, their contribution, an undying strength, an accumulation of experiences that can be referenced. It's symbolic of so much. It's a crappy, aging IKEA piece. Some of the parts have fallen off, broken apart, and it's been replaced and repaired with real wooden pieces and even handmade metal parts substituted in place of wood. One corner piece I snatched from a UCLA dorm when a guy was chucking his bed which was the same model as mine.
I held onto it for so long for so many reasons. I'm cheap. I became attached to it. It was more convenient to keep it than replace it. My friends put so much effort in supporting my irrational decision. They put time and blood into it that they didn't have to for me.
But at that moment everything changed. All of these sentiments and attachments existed, but I was no longer clinging to them. I was ready to let go of the the material possessions that represent my past so that I can move forward. I tore apart my bed and attacked it as a coping mechanism to my roommate returning after an unforgivable and defining betrayal which was also an attack against my past.
I didn't know it at the time I was removing a pivotal furniture piece from a miscellaneous living room area that I carved into a comfortable spot that it would aid in my transition towards a new change, a new path, the direction I need to pursue for a better future. By seeing the vacancy in my space giving a sparse, uncomfortable, less homey look, it gave this non-permanent feeling like I'm between spaces and I have to fulfill the void and complete the unfinished task of going forward in my life. All of this happened by getting rid of my comfortable, affordable bed.
I had to be driven to the edge of desperation and insanity to reach the motivation I need to not be stagnant.
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