spaced in

Living with one’s parents, as I’m sure I’ve said before, has its ups and downs, the most obvious up being all the free food - I mean of course, the meaningful experience of sharing one’s life with one’s family! - and the most obvious down being the absolute lack of privacy. Yes, now I come to think of it, I’ve definitely said this already. Once or twice or a bajillion times. You can probably tell it bugs me just a wee bit.

Well, since last night the tide has officially changed for A. and me, and it brought some valuable driftwood in the form of a new bed! (Which, for people who’d been sleeping on a fold-out crappo-bed for two years straight, is a big deal. I am posting this drunk and stoned, floating on a huge pink imaginary cloud of happiness, and singing a solemn hymn.) Okay, it’s a corner sofa. But it becomes a queen bed at night.

So in honour of this extraordinary purchase we have changed our whole living arrangement. We built a room around it, shaping a makeshift wall from bookcases, so it’s now a real enclosed space just for the two of us. And I say ‘we’ built it because I did all the heavy fussing. And I say ‘just the two of us’ because the cat and the dog are, for once, not welcome to sleep with us, and no, I don’t care what they think.

Now excuse me while I roll around on my new gloriously even bed with no bits of metal to get embedded in my back, and smell the gorgeously clean upholstery, maybe even lick it a little, just because it’s not likely to give me lethal poisoning. And after I’m done, you can come visit, we are not embarrassed of our room anymore, and we can probably spare a lick or two, if you’re into that sort of thing.