The Girl in the Window

I hated changing my bed sheets. They were too personal to change once a week. When I slept for months on the same bed sheet, it started to become me. It smelt like me because I slept on them so much. All the perfume I loved would come together as one magical smell on my sheet. All the dirt I chose to go to bed with would be there like a memory stained on it. Anybody who ever laid on it would have their smell there, so I could know what they looked like. I liked the smell of my sweat and tears; the smell of the sea salt and must. Even the smell of other people’s must smelt good to me.

Sometimes my sheets got so dirty someone could see the spot where I laid. It turned brown and looked unsanitary. But it was my dirt lying there nicely. It slowly went from the color of my sheet to the brown color of my skin. Smelt good too, like my natural scent, and my times of one night heavens.

It drove my mama crazy. She’d come into my room every other day hollering at me about how crazy I was for keeping my sheets so nasty.

“Girl, you needa change dat nasty sheet. Look like somebody died on there,” she said to me.
I said: “Ain’t nobody died but my dreams.” She shook her head.

“You sure is crazy like yo’ daddy was.”

“That dead too.” I never did change my sheets that day. Still brown and smelly they were. But it was comforting to me. It felt like me, and not like something or someone else tried to change it. It was me, a big part of me.