DIVERGENT CORNER

Experienced married men, please, I need clarity on a pressing matter. If you are single, just scroll past because you are likely not going to understand my predicament.

There is not a single day that goes by that I am not wowed by the level of creativity the devil uses women for. I mean, there is nothing too insignificant for him to use unless he doesn’t want to. A very random, inanimate object like a duvet is enough for them to torture you with. No, I don’t mean like press you with it or something like that. Ashe it turns out just the mere choice of which side of the duvet you decide to use to cover your tired self can cost you an entire night’s sleep.

When I was a bachelor, a duvet or blanket was one of those unnecessary necessities of the house. I could go days, sometimes even weeks, without realising there was no cover on the bed and could have fallen on the other side of the bed I rarely reached and life was just as perfect. No fuss, no buts. This is how I used to sleep.

I would lay down gently, slowly, on the bed because there’s a 90–95% chance that there is an injury hazard, and it could be on any side buried deep amongst the mountain of clothes on the bed. It never mattered which angle I lay down or if all my extremities are on the bed. I would wiggle myself just a little bit to feel if my laptop was nearby or if there was a knife I’d probably used to unscrew a perfectly working electronic but couldn’t manage to fix it back, and so I abandoned everything on the bed, including the shattered pieces of the electronic.

I would muster all the discipline in me and push them to the floor. Sometimes I could feel something sharp like a tiny needle chucking my bumbum and all I would do is hope that it was not a scorpion. If I was lucky and my hands touched anything that felt like a blanket, I’d pull it and cover the closest limb. All the other limbs would somehow wiggle their way into the pile of laundry, clean or dirty, it didn’t make any difference. I would sleep like a baby, some of the best sleeps I’ve ever had.

Sometimes the sleep was so sweet I’d wake up and realise the duvet had somehow opened its poorly fixed button mouth and swallowed one of my legs. You know you’ve had a wonderful, restful night when you have to get out of bed in two stages carefully. First, you detangle the and come out of the duvet, then you come out of the bed. You have to do it patiently too because the duvet is a trip hazard. If you rush it, you may slip and fall,  result. of which can be catastrophic.

Those were happy days. I reminisce and question my life decisions. I wonder what came over me that I gave up all that freedom and autonomy.

Right now, if you go to bed first, the devil sits and smiles at you while sipping Don Simon from hell. He waits until the very moment when you are in the middle of transitioning between awake and asleep, you know that moment when you’re neither conscious nor awake, that is the exact moment Lucifer whispers to his daughters:

“You won’t believe which direction your husband just put your precious duvet. If you leave him, that’s how the duvet will slip out of the covers and touch the floor, and you know I’ve told you, the day your precious covers touch the floor is the very day a terrible earthquake will consume you and your entire neighbourhood”

That’s when they will jump and come. Freezing winter, subzero temperature is not enough reason for her to have compassion on you and cover you properly, or at the very least, let you be. Before you know it, she will angrily pull the blanket off you. A cold breeze will just blow you from nowhere you’d think you fell inside snow.

That’s when she screams at you:

“I always tell you, this side of the duvet should always be towards your feet only and nowhere else! But you never listen. I sat this repeatedly everyday, must you always have to make me talk and let it seem like I’m living with a toddler!”

So now it is 03:42 hrs, and I’m lying flat on my back, staring at the ceiling, lost in deep thought trying to understand if the direction of a blanket has a direct or inverse correlation to the quality or duration of sleep. I cannot sleep but wonder what these gender consider important.

This is the same person that cannot use one ounce of brain power to try to know why the Safari app has not been launching on her laptop for over a week now. Why, why, why do these people give so much priority to the least important things in life?