FINAL DRAFT

Bunk Bed

I have lived in eight different homes in my lifetime. My family moves every three years with reasons stemming from lack of money, need for more space, and marriage disputes between my parents. Our ninth move this spring comes from the fact that my mother is sick of renting, and wants to finally own a home. Since my twin and I will be 20 years old this September, my mother announced that it is officially time to get rid of our bunk bed. As I grew older with every move, and certain things become less important for me to keep. My bunk bed has lived with us for as long as I can remember, and is the thing that I miss when I am homesick.

When my sister, Tamaia, and I were younger, we were small enough to share the twin sized mattress on the bottom bunk of the bed. My aunt claimed the top bunk. My mother’s sister, Julia, was 14 years younger than her. When my grandmother could no longer take care of Julia, my mom took her in at 11 years old. She was in high school in my earliest memories.

Julia was a slob. She would eat in our shared bedroom, and leave her leftovers on the bedside table. Rotten apples would end up rolling under the bed. Pieces of gum in wrappers were stuck to the bedposts. Her brown sandals covered in mud and grass shavings left traces from the door to the middle of the room, where she left them for us to trip on.

I remember our room used to smell horrible. We had heaps of clothes bins, brimming over the top with clothes well lived in. And by that, I mean doused in sweat and the scent of leaves and dirt. We went to the laundry mat every Sunday to wash our clothes. In the meantime, three active bodies filled those bins at an alarming rate.

“Do Y'all want to go to the mall, and pick up candles?” Julia would question. She knew we needed to do something to mask the ungodly stench.

And I remember being afraid of the dark. The shadows moved in the night time. My brother would tease me, and call me a baby. My crying caused my mother to invest in a nightlight. It was M&M themed. Nevertheless, the small beam of light did nothing to squash my fears. Finally, my mom realized just how dirty our room was.

“Julia, this is disgusting!” She exclaimed.

 “Look at all this trash. Ew!” She frowned in disgust.

“I am sorry Temp, but it is not even that bad. Just let me clean it.” Julia defended.

“Help me lift this bottom mattress. There should not be that much trash under there.” My mother bossed. Together they lifted the bottom mattress and found an entire colony of black ants racing over trash and rotten food. All of us cringed in repulsion. My Tamaia raced out of the room crying. My mom grabbed a can of raid from the pantry and sprayed our room corner to corner. She ushered me out to let Julia clear the room of all the dead ants.

The year Julia graduated high school and moved out, we spent the summer in the city with our cousins. We thought we would have our bedroom to ourselves. We thought wrong. While we were away, our family moved houses yet again. Our new place was a two-bedroom apartment across town. My parents converted my brother’s beds into a bunkbed and placed both beds into one room. The room was not quite built for two beds. They were aligned parallel to the door, and every night before bedtime Tamaia and I had to crawl over their bunk bed to get to ours. We spent countless nights talking till dawn. The night filled with laughter, teasing and talking. When claustrophobia overcame us, we would switch beds to change things up. On weekends we stayed up to watch old school movies from our parent’s collection. We huddled together on the only slice of open floor space. We craned our necks upward to view the tv on the very top of my brother’s dresser.     

I remember the day we got roaches. We had just finished watching Chucky in the living room when I left to go to bed. I was feeling paranoid from the movie and could not stop looking over my shoulder. At this point, Tamaia and I were still tiny enough to share a bed. I decided to climb to the top bunk to play with some toys we kept up there. As soon as I made it up, a roach crawled from under the sheets and down my arm. I screamed so loud I could have woken the dead people from the movie. I did not climb onto the top bunk for months. They appeared first in the bathroom, then ventured into the rest of the house. While we sat on our bunk beds, bored to tears on summer days, my brother, Mike, who was twelve years old at the time, would eat the dead ones to gross us out.

After three years had passed, we moved routinely, this time to a three-bedroom townhouse. Tamaia and I finally acquired a room to ourselves. We decorated the blue walls with posters of Disney stars and hung bead curtains in the doorway. We stuck colorful sun catchers to windows that lit the room in multiple colors when the sun hit the window. We took markers and doodled all over our bunk bed. We covered the bedposts with stickers and used decorative tape on the ladder. We purchased magnets from the dollar store and stuck the collection on the lowest rail of the bottom bunk. We invested time and energy to create a beautiful room that could truly felt like home. Despite this, our time living there ended all too quickly.

I was sitting on the bottom bunk next to Tamaia when my mother told us she was leaving my father. My brothers were lounging on the floor, completely unfazed. They were 15 and 18 years old at this point, had watched my parents’ marriage fall apart. Tamaia and I, on the other hand, were still little kids at the time.  We had been blindsided by the news, and immediately burst into tears.

“Maybe you guys just need a break from each other,” I remember suggesting.

“This ain’t Disney Channel,” my oldest brother, Ronell, chuckled in response. His reply only made me cry more. Over the course of the next couple weeks, my mother found another two-bedroom apartment. This time around, the apartment came with an office space, that we converted into another bedroom for Ronell. Mike stayed with my dad in the townhouse. Tamaia and I did not bother decorating our new room, even though it was bigger space. All that stood in it was our bunk bed, and boxes of unpacked clothes.

My family spent the summer divided. Tamaia and I spent these months in the townhouse, so Mike, who stayed with my dad, could watch us during the day. We slept in Ronell’s old bed at night in his and Mike’s formally shared bedroom. Ronell spent the summer as far away from the drama as possible. I can recall daydreaming about my parents solving their differences and moving back into one house. But after seeing them fight every time they were together, my wish turned into a far-fetched fantasy. I remember walking into my old empty bedroom in the town house and reminiscing about how perfect things looked before. After sharing a twin sized bed with my full-grown twin, I was sick of our living arrangements. My fantasy changed from my family being whole again to me sleeping in my bunk bed again!   

When school went back in session, all my siblings moved into my mother’s new apartment. We spent nights talking in Tamaia and I’s room, just as we did as little kids. This time my brothers brought blankets to lounge on the floor instead of laying in their adjacent bunk beds. And the topic was not filled with light-hearted teasing, but discussions about our parents, and how we all felt about their split. Ronell fidgeted as we conversed, and kept a steady rhythm tapping on the ladder with his knuckles. It was the soundtrack of our shared confessions.

Currently, my bunk bed stands in my teenage bedroom. It is surrounded by the pink walls that the most recent bedroom came with. With every move, fewer pieces and screws moved with us, so the rusted bed frame had become more rickety and shaky. The rails that had all our doodles were accidentally attached facing the wrong direction, so the drawings are hidden away from sight. This also means that the screw holes to latch the ladder to the bottom rail are facing the wrong side, and so the ladder is hanging free and completely unstable. My bunk bed lived a full life, and I am truly grateful for all the memories my bunk bed could be apart of.