goodbye.

The day has come, I’ve decided. I’m sorry.

You sprawl there, stripped and defenseless, lying in anxious angularity on the floor of the room that we are currently renting just for you. Although you try, like a faithful dog awaiting its next walk, to stay in the corner and out of the way, you cover half of the floorboards in your luxuriant vastness. You beckon to me, your faint polyester sheen and garden of imaginary flowers combining with the sinewy lines of your seams to put me into a somnolent trance. I resist. I look away, at the rest of the room, the room we pay hundreds for each month and which is supposed to serve as our writing room, studio, something, anything but a repository for unused things which we cannot bear to part with. When I walk through here, I always feel guilty. Am I too busy for a little nap? Couldn’t I just bring my book in here, sprawl out and read a chapter or two, my propped elbows perfectly supported, my feet nowhere near the edge?

I can’t. I don’t have the time, I don’t live in here. I tried to sleep in here a few nights, when my lover was sick, but the highway noise too easily invades this room. Still, after I’d rumpled those bedclothes a bit, you were all the more appealing to me in the days that followed. The memory foam my lover brought here, the one in the other room, seems so impersonal in its luxury, in its ease. You have a a few springs close to the surface, but of course I could always slide over to another part of you, cool and inviting and smooth. I know you intimately, where your hills and valleys are, and those knobby parts, and the softer ones that I’ve created with the knobby parts of myself.

We’ve hosted a few people, you and I, and each one of them has been impressed by you, by your size and your gentle support. Although you’d be there with us, you gave us all the room we wanted. And when I’d go elsewhere for a night or a few, myself the third part of a trio, you’d be there waiting for me, low to the ground, smelling of us, ready to soothe the aches I’d gained from straying.

But the time has come. You and I have outlasted many of my partnerships, but I cannot keep you here, ignoring you night after night, half-wishing I could put a desk where you are, give my books a place to rest and my hands a place to work. Were I to do nothing, you would wait there forever.

So I’m going to do what I should have done months ago. I’m going to see if I can find someone else who will appreciate you as I have, and who has space for all that you have to give. I hope you understand.