New Comforter

You scan the aisle of comforter selections hoping you won’t find one that you wouldn’t mind taking home. Your feet judgingly shuffle by clear plastic casings stuffed with navy blue striped cotton, mustard and burgundy velvet, woven quilts in solid plum, and flower-patterned linen duvets. You take note of the selection of colors, which all seem to have lost their saturation over the last few years in your shopping experience. After some brief reflection, you settle that this is the way you like your color palette anyway, and that you can just drop it. But then you begin to wonder: do I really like earth tones and muted colors, or has fashion culture just been withholding brighter options on the down low, making me forget the value of a brilliant red or a vibrant violet? Regardless, you sift through another shelf of bedding choices, passing on less-than-original styles within seconds of first impressions. “None of these feel like me,” you tell yourself. “I liked the one I had.”

You wouldn’t be here in the bedding aisle of this department store if the family dog simply tried harder not to be an idiot sometimes. All he had to do was not eat the much-too-accessible and evidently unattended collection of chocolate coins that he found someplace, for the record, outside of your bedroom. That way, he wouldn’t have felt sick enough to puke it all back up across your entire bed spread, which, after three full cycles, refused to wash out. But alas, the family dog is… a dog, and will continue sticking his nose around, forgetting about what went down the last time he sniffed around and found out.

The bedding you have is fairly new, and it had finally given you a way to pull together a theme in your room. You had just put up those real mature denim-looking curtains that you never got to install in your college dorm room. Well, “just,” meaning two years ago. Back when you used one of your, I don’t know, three allotted courage tokens for the year to ask your stepdad for help installing some curtain rods, and he thought it was a good idea to answer you with, “Oh, but when we moved in and I asked you if you wanted curtains you didn’t want any curtains, and now you want to put up curtains.” You had been living in that house for four years by this point and his argument should have expired 18 months tops after moving in, but you were too slow in remembering even this much and you never actually made this very valid comeback, so the moment passed and left you looking inferior to stupid Keith. Still, you finally had some curtains up in your room, and it felt a little bit like a fresh start. So you bought a light blue reversible comforter to compliment the denim-esque style of the curtains, and altogether brighten up the room.

“I’ve already got blue and white,” you think as you walk by a similarly light blue, white, and navy striped comforter set. You were originally here to find the comforter part by itself, no pillowcases or extra sheets. After all, it was only the top layer of the bed that took the hit of regurgitated chocolate and foil wrappings. Then you start to recall: the solid white fitted sheet you were using was starting to look dingy. “Guess I am gonna have to look for sheets while I’m here,” you admit. “This means I can start completely fresh,” you epiphanize with a glint of excitement.

You shift over an aisle and a half to begin browsing the sheet sets, starting with a set dyed with a dusty rose tint. Pink isn’t your color, even if you did manage to rock a pair of clear pink eyeglass frames during your best years in college. These charcoal-colored sheets might make a nice change – time would certainly leave less of a mark on these than it has on the white ones. Lavender? “No,” you hear yourself say aloud in the aisle on your lonesome. Purple is for go-getters; people who make a conscious choice to have a bold personality. You wince at the thought of walking into your room to see anything with a violet-based shade on it, and you quickly move on.

You immediately dismiss a handful of busy prints and patterns that seem like they could either be from 2014 or 2004. There’s one pattern that gives off an unignorable sense of having been the same sheets you moved in together with which have not been replaced for the last eight years, and you stare from your bathroom resenting these sheets every night because they’re a cruel reminder that you have to sleep next to this absolute mess of a person, and how did you ever let your life get this far, and was it ever going to turn out better than this or was this the “bright future” that my parents envisioned for me after all those years of playing doctor and going to nursing school, just for me to end up a middle school nurse with a failing side gig in photography?

“We’re not supposed to be buying stuff right now anyway,” you mumble to yourself behind a facemask, which you mostly still wear just because it lets you talk to yourself in public, and if anyone says anything about it to you it makes them one of the things that’s wrong with the world, meanwhile you look super conscious of other people’s health, but again, it’s really only so that you feel as unperceived by strangers as possible. “Not until we’ve made some more money.” Student loan payments mercilessly drain your checking and savings accounts as you carry on your shoulders an unintended job hiatus that, like a degenerate roommate, is definitely living a better life than you at your expense.

Nowadays, $100 is the new $20, and the average small purchase sets you back at least ten bucks. What were you even thinking when you came to this store? Sure, grandma just slid you a crisp twenty– I mean hundred dollars for this specific purchase when you forgot to stop yourself from mentioning the need for a new comforter in front of her for that exact reason. But why not just save the money to lessen the blow of the next tuition payment, and just deal with the dingy fitted sheet, sleeping in your uninsulated room in the middle of winter under that one thick blue-scale tie-dye throw like you have been for the last three days? Honestly, what is comfort but a luxury reserved for privileged people?

“Cooling, wicking, breathable, durable, silky, satin, performance, performance, performance, performance, performance… Okay, what does that even mean? Whose performance are these labels referring to? The sheets? Or the sleeper? Or…” You shudder for a number of reasons, then resume pretending not to pay the breathability of a set of sheets any mind – even though you know you literally always wake up a billion degrees warmer than how you fell asleep – and you direct your attention back to the lacking amount of colors to choose from.

There are browns and beiges, but you squint and think, “Let’s see what else they have,” despite your clear disinterest in most of the patterns and colors available. You’ve been into unsaturated shades of green lately. Your olive-colored Converse platforms are your favorite pair of shoes, which you often wear with a pair of light jade overalls, and your laptop, portable speaker, and new phone case are all the same forest green. So you’re shocked to find that you’ve yet to see any such shade between the sheets and comforters in the few aisles you’ve perused. You quickly (and irrationally) connect a set of dots in your head that going home without sheets in an unsaturated shade of green will be equal to going home empty-handed.

Maybe the kind of bedding you’re looking for isn't here. Or maybe it is, but you realize that what you’re really doing in the bedding section of this department store is grappling with the idea that buying a new comforter means bringing new furnishings into your house, a place which is growing mentally hostile by the day, and by bringing home a new comforter and sheets, you’d be admitting to yourself that you have to keep living here, something which you’ve been actively working to avoid for the last two to three years of time. Buying a new bed set confirms that you haven’t done enough to get yourself out of your parents’ house – that your best has not been enough – and it puts into question what could possibly be left to do by this point. How did you let your life get this far? Is it ever going to turn out better than this?

You find something called a “jersey sheet” in a color that’s a kind of cross between caramel and cognac, and you return to the cheap end of the comforter selections where you remember being genuinely struck by a tan corduroy comforter. You’ve made your choices, and on your way to the checkout you stop to pick out a candle, because you might as well. You haul in your arms an unmarked sheet set, a comforter which, as it will remain unbeknownst to you for several hours, is not in a queen size but an extra-long twin, and a fresh candle whose wick is totally off center. You walk down a maze of aisles toward the front of the store pretending you don’t need a basket, and ignoring the very present reality that the items that you’re gripping with all the might of your two ring fingers, just like the denim-esque quasi-blackout curtains that now drape over your windows, will be fun to set up in your room and will be cool to use for the first couple of nights, but also like that certain patterned sheet set, will ultimately become a cruel reminder that you are stuck, and sleeping in these new sheets in your old bed tonight will have meant that, today, you lost.