clean, white cotton sheets

no idea why I like them. the smell... the feel... the fantasyland they conjure up...

a sturdy oak four poster bed in a castle in middle-ages England... a soft summer breeze blowing through the window... 100 pillows all in white cotton tossed onto a thickly blanketed, white-cottoned bedspread. a man and a woman.... she (probably me) in a nightdress with  an empire neckline revealing an ample bosom, he having just rode in on a white horse tied up outside and looking like Gabriel Byrne... no... wait... it is Gabriel Byrne...  he seduces her... they get lost under the clean, white cotton sheets...

or because the illusion of what they represent is the thing that keeps me making the same mistakes.

hm. no.

more likely? it's because I believe what my friend Steve says about women and sheets: "one should never berate a woman with new sheets". and though I seem to be berated a lot these days by the same two people I hasten to add, I still believe. and I guess I hurt them pretty badly or else they wouldn't be so berating. 

but don't they know I'm a woman with clean, white cotton sheets? maybe the reason I'm getting berated is because they aren't new. maybe that's why. they were expecting new, pristine, crisp clean white sheets. but they're getting cleaned but frayed... coffee stains on the top right corner... 


or maybe it's got nothing to do with sheets, cotton or otherwise, and I don't understand that I can't just go and hurt someone and get away with it.

but what's to 'get away with'? a thing that ends badly because no one can agree on who was in the right and who was in the wrong... and then there's the discrepancy in the illusion that there is always one person in the right and one person in the wrong... and the only real wrong thing is that the feelings aren't there... any more, never were, went away, or wished them to be so badly that they appeared, however briefly, only to sail away again, as quickly as they arrived?

I would love to crawl under the clean whites and disappear for a while, let it all soak in, and marvel at how quickly things can unfold, unravel, and bewilder. and not be talked into thinking that just because it's a 'big deal' means I need to drop everything else. no. big deal or no, I still need time to feel the sheets. 

who can relate to this line in eat pray love: "since I was 15 I have either been together with a guy or breaking up with a guy." except for maybe you straight guys out there, a few... well, I can, and no matter how beautiful the feelings and how glorious the beauty of the sensual is, I need to go to the slums of my head for a while and just see things for what they are, not for what I think they are, but for the reality of my life:

staying snug under my clean, white cotton sheets - my ipod playing Breaking us in Two over and over again - and accepting human relationships and all their complexities for what they really, actually and authentically are: threads of the fabric that make up those clean, white cotton sheets that smell so nice and feel so damn good.