PILLOW TALK

Why do we so often want the cool side of the pillow? For sheets and blankets, we request and require nothing but warmth. We simply need to be contained for a few hours in their piled-up abundance of slightly stacked heat. Pillows, however, play by their own rules, and we have somehow all agreed that the pillow is boss. This is bullshit. Why should we let these little sacks continually mess with our heads?

Even on the coldest of winter nights, I will suddenly awaken and try to make sure that the pillow is touching the side of my cheek of with its own coolest face. Something must be going on, physiologically speaking, but I don't speak physiological, so I'm perpetually stumped. Does the cool side of the pillow counterintuitively react with the warm touch of my cheek, which in turn has been heatened and heightened by the protective covering of my sheets?

It makes sense in the summer, in the glory of your gotchies, in the buff of your buffness, to want that cool pillow to give up its chill. But why in the winter? Why do I still demand that silky-smooth coolness?

There have been times in the past few years when I've slept for months on end with nothing more than a glorified bean-bag for a makeshift pillow, and, even though I know I'm asking too much, I still toss that bean-bag thingee over and around and back to its first side while I try to get some non-existent coolness to come up to me. All for nothing.

Do bean-bags not, like, contain the capacity to harbor such cold? Maybe not. I'm no expert on stitching together the stuff of our lives. I just know that pillows -- both as an ideological concept and as a verifiable noun that exists as a thing --  seem to be these softly magical lumps of inert nothingness that nevertheless manage to quietly defy all biological norms. Pillows appear to have entered our universe from this other, alternate, ulterior mode of existence where fluffy collections of feathers have somehow gained the right to mess with our most intimate and tactile sense of our bodies and selves. The right side of my head and the span of my neck nightly longs for and requires their softly cold nudge of communion.