Pillow Talk

I couldn’t tell you the kind of pillow my dad sleeps on nowadays, but when I was growing up, as long as I remember, he rested his head every night on a oversized rock in a cotton bag, a solid lump of God knows what substance, antimatter perhaps. It made for the greatest pillow fights however, as one whack with the Sphinx’s Nose that was lodged down in there would catapult your victim back in time. My mother’s pillow, by comparison to the Rock of Gibraltar, was a waif, a pillow in every sense of the word. On top of which, it was utter useless in a fight.

I only had one pillow throughout my childhood, from the day I started using pillows until the day it disintegrated underneath my head, just one, which was great because my pillow was perfect, just the right amount of thickness and weight. I had it for nearly 15 years, I’m guessing. I took it to college, even, and I’m not sure what happened to it after that. I remember the cover ripping to shreds to expose the foam inside from years of wear and I’ll bet I just ended up throwing out because I might have started swallowing small scraps of it in my sleep.

I haven’t had a good night sleep since I got rid of it.

Since then, I’ve been searching for the perfect pillow on which to rest my head and I haven’t been able to find it. Each night, I’ve been sleeping on a pillow that is beyond description: It has four levels, one on each corner, and throughout the night, I find myself flopping the pillow from one corner to the next in search of the perfect height. Since then, I’ve been trolling the linen aisles of housewares in search of the perfect pillow. I walk down the aisle, squeezing the pillows like I’m in some sort of Charmin commercial in search of the perfect pillow.

It is an inexplicable journey, a quest that so far has been completely unfulfilled and has left me listless in bed night after night, tossing and turning. In the morning, I ache. My neck hurts, my head hurts. I hurt. What’s a guy to do?

Well, I thought, for a moment that my journey ended yesterday when I found, what I thought was the perfect pillow. I bought one, extolled its virtues to Kara a few aisles later and she returned to pick the very same product. It was thick, heavy, firm…nay, extra firm. In the store, it appeared perfect. So perfect, that when I came home, I collected up the half-dozen random pillows that collect in the various bedrooms and I carried them to the curb—trash day is tomorrow you know. I was excited about my new pillow, anticipating its opening night. That is, until I laid my head down on it just after midnight…and the torture began.

Apparently, there are three types of people in this world: those that sleep on their backs; those that sleep on their sides and those that sleep on their stomachs. Well, I’m of the latter persuasion, and my thick new pillow with ample stuffing nearly broke off my neck. How can a person sleep with their head at such an unnatural angle? It just isn’t possible, and I discovered this after hours of flipping, flopping and tossing and spinning most of the night. I stuffed my arm under it; I laid with it under my chest; I squeezed it, crunched it and twisted it, but nothing good came of it. I ended the night not using a pillow at all.

So, now I’m back to square one…and I don’t even have old lumpy to fall back on.