Snagged Sock

fiction... kinda

My alarm goes off and I roll over, onto the cold side of my bed. The left side. I saw a Tik Tok last week that said women should always sleep on the left side of the bed to “enable their highest potential”.

According to user44485576, “this position helps to promote femininity, maintain balance, and attract a healthy relationship”. I’ve been trying to find my own sense of femininity and balance. Drinking cherry juice from a wine glass, coating my teeth with fluoride-free toothpaste before clicking in my retainer, combing my hair with jojoba oil and wrapping it up in a silk scarf, dry brushing my skin until it’s red hot with friction and then lathering it with a serum way out of my price range, that smells like algae.

What’s more feminine and balanced than all of that?

As I sit up, I’m reminded that she slept on the left side of my bed. Always with an eye mask on and earplugs in - dead to the world until I poked her awake. I would find her earplugs scattered on the floor of my bedroom: flesh colored bullets that I could flatten between my pointer finger and thumb and watch re-expand. Right after the breakup, I lamented finding them. Now, as I roll onto the arctic left side of my bed, I hope to find one stranded plug, a tiny reminder that the last year and a half wasn’t just a dream.

As I put my feet on the floor, I notice I fell asleep with my socks on, which is very unlike me. I usually don’t like to have anything restricting me in my sleep. It must’ve been the cocktail of cherry juice, magnesium, and a 15 year old YouTuber doing ASMR makeup that left me unbothered. Oh well, at least my feet are warm.

As I shuffle to the bathroom, I snag my sock on a tiny nail that sticks out of my hardwood floors in the bedroom doorway. I wish I could say it was a new development. This little quirk has been there since I moved in, and in the last two years I’ve done absolutely nothing about it. I’ve destroyed so many socks, innocently leaving my room and then feeling the familiar rrrip and pull of the rusty piece. Every time it happens - I assess the damage, scold myself, and swear I’ll do something about it. I never do.

Avoidance is a funny thing. In avoiding, I’m actually making a choice. I see the nail. I inevitably feel the nail. And still I choose to do nothing about it. If it was something that would hurt anyone else, if anyone else’s sock was being torn up, I would’ve fixed it immediately. The constant reminder is maybe some sort of self punishment, as if to say to myself “you’re not worth fixing it”.

Or maybe, removing the nail is the tip of the problem iceberg, and I know that waiting for me would be a steep tumble through all the other things I'm not addressing. I haven’t been taking care of things. I’ve been avoiding myself. I’ve ignored hard truths. I was tripping up over and over again on things I didn’t want to deal with. The smallest one being the tiny nail poking out of my floorboards.

Two Sundays ago - alone, bored, in my apartment - I had the urge to, literally, hit the nail on the head. I marched over to my cabinet and pulled out my toolbox. I pulled the hammer out and in one motion, hit the nail into the floorboard. And it was gone.

That…. was it? It was really that easy all along? What was I waiting for? Why did it take me so long to do the thing I needed to do? I breathed a sigh of relief, no one there to congratulate me except myself.

I miss the snag sometimes. I liked being the girl who didn’t deal with things and kept on going. It felt strong, even if it was the opposite. It is nice that my socks are all in tact, though.

Now most nights, when I go to sleep with my hair oiled and my skin shining, I will my body to sleep on the left side of my bed. As I doze off, I try to ignore the barrage of memories and moments I regret. At least I can tick “fix the nail in my floorboard” off the list. I search for “femininity, harmony, and balance” as I drift into unconscious, waiting for the left side of my bed to do its job.

I find myself at dawn back on the right side of the bed, sometimes at a diagonal, and with my hands curled under my chin, like a drooling Rodin sculpture, hoping that when I wake, I’ll stop thinking and start doing.