TumbleDweeeb

The Physics of Sleeping With You
By: Emmitt Owens
(Index #12012025)

   Every night, the same accusation flies across the mattress like a thrown pillow.
     “You’re doing it again,” Marina says, her voice carrying through the darkness.
   I open one eye. I am currently occupying approximately seven inches of mattress space—what Marina has taken to calling “The Annexed Province of You-ville.” I know this because I measured it last week with a tape measure.
     “Doing what?” I whisper.
   “HOGGING. THE. BED.”
     I would gesture to the vast expanse of mattress she’s currently sprawled across like a starfish claiming an ocean, but both my arms are pinned beneath me in what I call the “human burrito position”—the only way to maintain my claim to any territory whatsoever.
   “Marina,” I say carefully, “I’m literally clinging to the edge. There are mountain climbers with better odds than me right now.”
     “That’s what a bed hog would say.”
   This is my life.

Let me paint you a picture: Marina is magnificent. She’s five feet three inches tall, built like a Viking shield-maiden, and when she sleeps, she doesn’t just sleep—she performs sleep. I, on the other hand, am five-foot-nine and weigh approximately the same as a medium-sized backpack full of groceries.

   The bed is a queen. In the store, it looked reasonable. The manager told us it was “perfect for couples.” He clearly had never met Marina. At home, with Marina in it, the queen bed transforms into a twin. Sometimes I think it transforms into a cot.
     People say, “Get a king bed.”
   We tried one in the store. She somehow managed to lie diagonally across two demo mattresses at once. The sales associate asked if she was okay. She was just “testing the space.” She tested it by occupying all of it, plus some theoretical space that exists only in higher dimensions.
     Marina says I’m the problem.
   I’ve started telling people I “slept on the Marina” instead of “slept on the bed.” It’s more accurate. When people ask how I slept, I say, “Like a barnacle on the hull of a cruise ship.”

   It starts around 7PM, when we both lay down in our respective territories like diplomats at a peace treaty signing. I’m on my side. She’s on hers. There’s even a little DMZ in the middle—a neutral zone of wrinkled sheet that, for approximately six minutes, belongs to neither of us.
     Marina kisses me goodnight. “I love you,” she says.
   “I love you too,” I reply, knowing full well that in approximately thirty minutes to an hour, love will not save me from the coming storm.
     By 8:07, Marina has rotated forty-five degrees.
   By 8:15, she’s diagonal.
     By 8:30, her left leg has crossed into my territory like a reconnaissance mission.
   By 10pm, she has achieved what I call “The Starfish Supreme”—all four limbs extended to the absolute corners of the mattress, creating a human X that defies my ability to remain on a flat surface.
     I am now occupying a space roughly the size of a dinner plate, balanced on the edge of the bed like a trapeze artist on a string. I’ve started making monthly payments on my mattress space. It’s the only way to keep access. The Marina Empire accepts payment in the form of back pain and dignity.
   “Stop pushing me,” Marina mumbles in her sleep.
     I’m not touching her. I’m not touching anything. I’m essentially levitating through sheer will and fear of the floor. I’ve developed core muscles I didn’t know existed just from trying to maintain my position. I could probably hold a plank for forty-five minutes at this point.

10:47 PM – The Pillow Hostage Negotiation
   Something’s wrong. I can feel it.
    I do a quick inventory: my head is resting on what appears to be my own forearm because my pillow has vanished. Completely. As if it never existed.
   I look over at Marina. She is sleeping peacefully, her head propped up on a mountain of pillows. I count them. Five pillows.
     We own four pillows total.
   “Marina,” I whisper.
     Nothing.
   “Marina, where did the fifth pillow come from?”
     She mumbles something that sounds like “magic” and hugs all five pillows closer, like a dragon who’s just spotted an intruder near her gold hoard.
   I’m holding air. I’m literally cradling the concept of a pillow, the Platonic ideal of head support, while she’s over there like a pillow dragon hoarding her textile treasure.
     “Maybe you stole one,” she murmurs without opening her eyes.
   “FROM WHERE? ANOTHER DIMENSION?”
     “You’re being loud,” she says, somehow adding a sixth pillow to her collection. I don’t know where it came from. I think she’s summoning them from the astral plane at this point.

I consider my options: I could try to reclaim one pillow, but that would require reaching across the Marina zone, which is like trying to steal from a sleeping bear. Instead, I rest my head on my forearm and accept my fate. My arm will be numb by morning, but at least it’s attached to my body. The pillows are long gone.

11:34 AM – The First Great Repositioning
   Marina shifts. It’s not dramatic—just a small adjustment, really. She moves maybe three inches to her left.
     Somehow, this three-inch movement results in me losing an entire foot of mattress space. It’s like a magic trick, except instead of pulling a rabbit out of a hat, she’s pulling my sleeping space out of existence.
   I readjust. I’m now at a thirty-degree angle, my legs bent in a way that suggests I’m either very flexible or very desperate. (It’s the second one.)
     “Why are you moving so much?” Marina asks, still asleep.
   “I’m not moving. Physics is moving me.”
     “That doesn’t make sense.”
   Nothing about this makes sense, Marina. Nothing.

Around 1 AM is when the real chaos begins.
   Marina is a spinner. Not like a DJ or a pottery wheel—like a rotisserie chicken. She rotates a full 360 degrees, sometimes eight times per night, and every time she does, the fitted sheet comes with her. I’ve started to think of it as her nightly ritual, like some people do yoga and Marina does full-body rotations that would make an Olympic gymnast weep.

2:03 AM – The Mattress Seismic Event
   She rolls. But this isn’t a normal roll. This is an event.
     The entire mattress shifts. Not just moves—shifts. Two full inches off the bed frame with an audible scraping sound like tectonic plates grinding against each other.
   I grab the edge instinctively, my knuckles white. “Did we just have an earthquake?”
     “Stop being dramatic,” Marina says without waking up, which is itself dramatic because she’s saying this while in the middle of what can only be described as a full barrel roll.
   The bed tilts. Actually tilts. Like we’re on a pirate ship ride at a theme park, except the ride is my relationship and the only prize is potential floor impact and a lifetime of back problems.
     I watch in horror as the corner of the sheet pops off with a soft thwap, then another corner, then another. Marina rolls once more—a complete barrel roll like Tom Cruise in a fighter jet—and the fitted sheet hurricanes toward her, balling up against her body and pulling itself completely out from under me.
     The sheet has given up. The sheet, an inanimate object, has looked at this situation and chosen a side—and it wasn’t mine.
   Now I’m on bare mattress. The mattress pad is holding on for dear life, but I can see it’s considering its options.

2:15 AM – The Great Comforter Wormhole
   The sheet has united itself around Marina in a single mission: overthrow all remaining mattress space. The comforter is half on the floor, half pinned beneath her in a configuration that shouldn’t be possible in three-dimensional space. I think she’s discovered a fourth dimension and it’s made entirely of stolen blankets.
     I reach for my corner of the comforter—the corner I carefully tucked around myself at 11 PM in what now seems like a different lifetime. I give it a gentle tug.
   It vanishes.
     Not like it moved—it vanishes. Completely disappears into the Marina zone, which operates on different laws of physics than the rest of reality. Quantum mechanics has nothing on whatever is happening in Marina’s half of the bed.
   I tug again. Nothing. The blanket has entered a wormhole. Physics refuses to comment. Einstein is rolling in his grave, and frankly, he’s probably taking up less space than Marina.
     I’m lying there on the Marina—sorry, on my seven-inch strip—sheet-less, blanket-less, wondering if I should just sleep in the bathtub. The bathtub is starting to look spacious. The bathtub is starting to look like a viable option. I could put a pillow in there. If I could find a pillow. Which I can’t. Because Marina has them all.
   Marina’s eyes open.
     “Why,” she says like a prosecuting attorney presenting to a jury, “did you take all the blankets?”
   I just stare at her. She is wrapped head to toe in fabric. She looks like a mummy. She looks like she lost a fight with a laundry basket and the laundry won. She is so thoroughly covered in blankets that I can barely see her face.
     “Marina, you ARE the blankets at this point.”
   “Don’t be ridiculous,” she says, pulling the comforter tighter around herself.

2:31 AM – The Draft That Accuses You
   I’m shivering. The room isn’t even cold, but without any covering whatsoever, I’ve become a human popsicle. My teeth are chattering. I’m getting goosebumps on my goosebumps.
     Marina growls—actually growls—and says, “Quit stealing all the warm air.”
   “All the blankets are on you,” I say, my voice small and defeated.
     “Then why am I cold?”
   “YOU’RE NOT COLD. YOU’RE WRAPPED IN A DUVET BURRITO.”
     “I can feel a draft. You’re letting cold air in.”
   “I’M NOT LETTING ANYTHING IN. I’M JUST LYING HERE, SLOWLY FREEZING TO DEATH.”
     “Marina.”
   “What.”
     “Look at yourself. Really look.”
   She glances down like a woman flawlessly pretending she doesn’t care and who, frankly, has never been guilty a single day in her life. She is mummified in our bedding. She looks like she survived a blanket avalanche. If archaeologists dug her up in a thousand years, they’d assume this was some kind of burial ritual.
     “This is your fault,” she says.
   “HOW? HOW IS THIS MY FAULT?”
     “You made me cold, so I grabbed the blankets.”
   “YOU’RE WRAPPED IN EVERY FABRIC WE OWN. YOU’RE WEARING THE CONCEPT OF WARMTH.”
     “Because YOU were hogging the bed.”
   I gesture weakly at my sliver of mattress—the Annexed Province of You-ville, as she calls it. “Marina. I’m basically hanging off the side. There are people on life rafts with more space than me.”
     “Well you must have pushed me to roll over.”
   “You’re twice my size! I couldn’t push you if I had a forklift!”
     “Then explain,” she says, sitting up now, fully committed to this absolutely unhinged argument, the blankets falling around her like royal robes, “why I keep waking up with no room.”
   “BECAUSE YOU SLEEP LIKE A BEYBLADE!”
Silence.
     The kind of silence that comes before either an apology or a natural disaster.
   “I do not.”
     “You spin, Marina. You spin like you’re trying to generate electricity. You spin like you’re auditioning for Cirque du Soleil. You rolled so hard tonight the sheet is balled up somewhere near your knees. THE FITTED SHEET. It gave up. It surrendered. It filed for divorce.”
   She looks at the naked mattress corner, then back at me, then back at the corner.
     “That’s because you pulled it off.”
   “I DIDN’T MOVE. I HAVEN’T MOVED IN THREE HOURS. I’M FOSSILIZING.”

   Sometimes, right before she falls asleep, Marina will pull me in tight and whisper, “I just like being close to you.”
     Which is adorable.
   Which makes my heart swell.
     Which makes me think, “This is the woman I love, and she loves me, and everything is perfect.”
   Until 2 AM, when “close to you” becomes “fully inside the Marina Tectonic Plate Shift Zone” and “being close” means “being slowly crushed by the inexorable force of her sleeping body.”
     But I’ll take it. Because in those few moments before sleep, when she pulls me close, I forget about the coming territorial war. I forget about the Annexed Province. I forget that in a few hours, I’ll be clinging to the edge of the mattress like a rock climber who forgot his rope.
   Love is complicated.

3:02 AM – Midnight Ninja Kick
   I’m just drifting back to sleep, having made peace with my seven-inch area, when—
     THWACK.
   Marina’s arm swings through the air in her sleep like she’s auditioning for a kung fu movie and makes direct contact with my shoulder.
     “OW!”
   She doesn’t wake up. She just… continues snoring. Aggressively. Like she’s snoring an apology but the apology is also a threat. Like the snore is saying, “Sorry, but also, it’ll happen again.”
     “Aggressive spooning is still assault,” I whisper to the ceiling.
   Her leg twitches. I brace for impact.
     Nothing comes. This time.
   I know it’s only a matter of time. Marina’s sleeping body is like a loaded weapon. You never know when it’s going to go off, but you know it will, and you know it’ll hurt.

3:28 AM – The Sleep-activated Summoning Ritual
   Marina’s arm flops dramatically off the side of the bed like she’s fainting in a Shakespeare play.
     It lands directly on our dog, Biscuit, who’s been sleeping peacefully on the floor, probably dreaming of squirrels and tennis balls and a world where humans don’t randomly smack him at three in the morning.
   Biscuit—whom I’ve recently knighted as Lord Biscuit of Bedfordshire—assumes he’s been beckoned and hauls himself aboard like a hungover hippo.
     His claws scrabble against the hardwood. He hits the side of the mattress like he’s storming a beach. He wedges himself between us—well, between Marina and the edge where I’m clinging—and promptly begins pushing me further off the mattress with his furry butt.
   I’m now 70% off the bed. Maybe 75%.
     Marina wakes up slightly, one eye opening just enough to register the chaos. “Why is the dog here?”
   “BECAUSE YOU CAST THE SPELL!”
     “What spell?”
   “THE SUMMONING SPELL WITH YOUR SLEEP ARM. YOU SUMMONED HIM. YOU’RE A SLEEP WIZARD.”
     “That’s not a thing.”
   “THEN WHY IS HE HERE?”
     “Maybe he missed you.”
   Lord Biscuit of Bedfordshire snores, his butt pressed firmly against my ribcage. Of course he’s loyal to the Marina. She controls the blankets. She controls the territory. She’s the alpha. I’m just the guy who feeds him and takes him for walks and cleans up his poop, but sure, he’s loyal to Marina.
     I try to gently relocate him. He weighs forty pounds but feels like four hundred when he doesn’t want to move. He opens one eye, looks at me like I’m the problem, and goes back to sleep.
   “Can you help me move him?” I whisper.
     Marina is already asleep again.

4:15 AM – The Foot Siege
   I’ve reclaimed maybe four inches of space after carefully relocating His Lordship back to the floor. It took fifteen minutes and required me to lift him like I was diffusing a bomb. One wrong move and I’d wake Marina.
     I settle back into my space. My glorious, hard-won four inches of space.
   Then I feel it.
     Marina’s feet. Creeping across the invisible border like soft, determined invaders. Cold feet. Ice-cold feet. Feet that feel like they’ve been stored in a freezer on purpose.
   They colonize my calves.
     I push them back gently, trying not to wake her.
   They return. Stronger. More confident.
     I push again.
   This time her whole leg follows, draping over mine. Her knee lands on my thigh like a judicial gavel.
     “Marina, your feet—”
   “They’re cold,” she mumbles, the tone of someone who is the victim in this situation. “Your side has all the warmth.”
     “MY SIDE IS TWO INCHES WIDE. THERE IS NO WARMTH. THERE IS ONLY SURVIVAL.”
   Her feet dig in. They’re staying.

Here’s the thing about being the smaller person in the bed: you lose every argument by default. Not because you’re wrong, but because somehow, …somehow…, your partner’s sleeping body has the gravitational pull of a small planet, and you’re just a satellite trying not to get pulled into the atmosphere and burned up.
   Size matters. Physics matters. And in the bed, Marina is physics.

4:47 AM – The Attraction Field
   I need my phone. It’s charging on the nightstand. On my side. Or what used to be my side before the Marina Empire expanded its borders.
     I reach for it carefully, trying not to disturb the delicate ecosystem of the bed.
   As I do, Marina rolls slightly—just the tiniest adjustment—and my phone, which is plugged into the wall, somehow slides under her.
     “How…” I stare in disbelief.
   She has magnetic thighs. It’s the only explanation. There’s no other way to explain how an object that is tethered to a wall outlet can be absorbed into her gravitational field.
     Every item I need—my phone, my spare socks from earlier, my water bottle, my will to live—slides under her like she’s generating a gravitational field. She’s a black hole. A beautiful, snoring black hole.
   I reach for the phone, my arm stretching across the mattress.
     She rolls.
   Just a fraction. Just enough.
     I write my will mentally.
   I manage to extract my phone. It takes five minutes of careful, delicate movements, like I’m performing surgery. One wrong move and I’ll wake her.
     Marina isn’t just in the bed. She becomes the bed. She annexes it. She colonizes it. If the mattress had a flag, she’d plant hers in the center and claim it for the Marina Empire, population: her, Lord Biscuit of Bedfordshire, five pillows, and all known blankets.

5:03 AM – The Expansion of the Marina Empire
   She’s sleep-talking now. Her voice is soft but authoritative, like a general addressing troops.
     “This land…” she murmurs, arms spreading wider like she’s blessing a crowd, “is my land…”
   Her left arm extends into my territory, claiming another two inches.
     Then her right leg follows, a full territorial expansion.
   Then somehow, through what I can only assume is dark magic or a deal with some kind of sleep demon, her torso rotates and what was once my half of the bed officially becomes Marina Territory, Incorporated.
     Population: Her.
   Government: Absolute monarchy.
     Official language: Snoring.
   And yet—and yet—every single morning, she wakes up, looks at me barely clinging to existence on my side, and says: “You really need to stop spreading out so much at night.”

5:45 AM – Gravity Reverses
   Marina executes what I can only describe as a barrel roll with a half-twist, like she’s competing in Olympic gymnastics except the sport is “aggressive sleeping” and she’s going for gold.
     The mattress tilts.
   I go airborne.
     Actually airborne. For a brief, beautiful moment, I’m flying. I’m free. I’m no longer bound by the tyranny of the bed or the Marina Empire or the laws of physics as we understand them.
   Then: thud.
     I hit the floor. Hard. My shoulder takes the brunt of it. I lie there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, wondering if this is it. If this is how it ends.
   Marina’s voice drifts down from the bed like a deity speaking from Mount Olympus. “Will you get me a glass of water while you’re up?”
     I’m staring at the ceiling from the carpet, my body sprawled like a crime scene outline. “Sure. Might as well get up and stay up as well.”
   “That’s dramatic.”
     “I’M ON THE FLOOR, MARINA.”
   “Then get back in bed.”
     “THERE’S NO ROOM.”
   “There’s plenty of room. You’re just being territorial about the Annexed Province.”
     I consider staying on the floor. The floor is flat. The floor doesn’t spin. The floor doesn’t steal blankets or summon dogs or colonize space. The floor is honest. The floor is pure.
   But I love Marina, so I climb back into the bed. Back to my seven inches. Back to the Annexed Province of You-ville.
     Back to the only place I want to be, even if that place is currently the size of a bookmark.

   One night—a different night, a night that lives in infamy in my memory—I tried an experiment.
     I took painter’s tape and marked our “sides” right down the middle of the bed. Fifty-fifty. Perfectly fair. Democracy in action.
   “This is ridiculous,” Marina said, watching me work with the tape measure.
     “It’s science,” I replied, drawing the line, mapping new territories. “It’s empirical evidence. It’s the only way to prove my point.”
   “Your point is wrong.”
     “THEN THE TAPE WILL PROVE IT.”
   We went to sleep. I set up my phone to record a time-lapse. I was ready. I was prepared. I was about to expose the greatest injustice in modern sleeping arrangements.
     By 1 AM, Marina had crossed the tape line.
   By 2 AM, she’d rolled over it twice and the tape was stuck to her back, where it remained like a tail.
     By 3 AM, she was fully on my side, and I was teetering on the edge, as usual, and the tape line had been completely obliterated, like a border destroyed by an invading army.
   When I showed her the video in the morning, she watched the whole thing like a college student watching a documentary about girls going wild.
     Then she looked at me and said, “See? You didn’t move at all. That’s selfish. You have to compromise.”
   “COMPROMISE?! I GAVE YOU MY ENTIRE HALF OF THE BED.”
     “Relationships are about give and take.”
   “I’VE GIVEN YOU SEVENTY PERCENT OF THE BED. MAYBE EIGHTY PERCENT.”
     “And I appreciate that,” she said, kissing my forehead like I’m a child who tried his best but didn’t quite understand the assignment. “But you could give a little more.”
   “THERE’S NOTHING LEFT TO GIVE. I’M ALREADY GIVING YOU SPACE THAT DOESN’T EXIST.”
     “That’s the spirit,” she said.

2:22 AM (Another Night) – The Sleep-Talking Trial
   This is maybe the third or fourth week of the Great Bed War. I’ve lost track. Time has no meaning when you’re operating on four hours of sleep and those four hours are split across seventeen different positions.
     “You stand accused,” Marina announces in her sleep, her voice sounding off like a television judge presiding over a case of national importance, “of BED TREASON.”
   I’m awake now. Fully awake. My eyes are open. My brain is processing. “Marina?”
     “How do you plead?” She’s still asleep. Eyes closed. Face completely serious. She’s pointing at me. With her finger. Like she’s identifying me in a lineup.
   “These charges are fabricated,” I whisper, playing along because what else am I going to do at 2:22 AM?
     “GUILTY,” she declares, her hand slamming down on the mattress like a gavel. “The court finds the defendant GUILTY of bed treason, mattress hoarding, and conspiracy to steal blankets.”
   “I don’t have any blankets!”
     “GUILTY!”
   “This is a kangaroo court!”
     “The sentence is: LESS MATTRESS.”
   She rolls toward me. I lose another inch. My monthly payment just went up. The interest rate is compounding. I’m pretty sure I’m going to owe her mattress space in perpetuity at this point.
     “This isn’t a fair trial!” I protest to the darkness.
   “Court adjourned,” Marina says, and immediately starts snoring again, like she didn’t just prosecute me for crimes I didn’t commit.
     The snoring is the gavel. The snoring is the bailiff saying, “All rise.” The snoring is justice, Marina-style.

6:47 AM – The Morning Gaslighting Finale
   The alarm goes off. It’s a gentle chime, the kind designed to wake you peacefully, which is ironic because I haven’t slept peacefully in weeks.
     Marina stretches—full body stretch, limbs in all directions, like she’s auditioning for a yoga commercial or demonstrating how to take up maximum space as a lifestyle choice. She looks refreshed. Radiant. Glowing. Like she slept on a cloud made of other, smaller clouds, all of which were ethically sourced and perfectly fluffed.
   I look like I survived a natural disaster. I didn’t sleep on the Marina so much as I clung to her perimeter for dear life, like a barnacle on a ship that’s actively trying to scrape me off.
     “Ugh,” she groans, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. “I didn’t sleep worth a shit last night.”
   I stare at her. My mouth opens. No sound comes out.
     “You… what?”
   “Barely slept,” she says, yawning. “So tired. You really need to give me more room at night.”
     I’m lying at a forty-five-degree angle, half on the bed, half suspended in dread. My spine has a carpet imprint. My shoulder is numb. I think my left leg has forgotten it’s attached to my body.
   “This is abuse,” I croak, my voice barely human.
     “Love you too,” she says brightly, kissing my forehead like someone who has never done anything wrong ever in the history of sleeping. “I’ll probably need to take a nap at lunch. Maybe two. Definitely three.”
   She bounces out of bed—actually bounces, like she’s in a commercial for mattresses or vitamins or the concept of sleeping well. She’s energized. She’s ready for the day.
Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure I died sometime around 4 AM and this is just my ghost clinging to the mattress out of habit.
     Lord Biscuit of Bedfordshire yawns from his spot at the foot of the bed—my former spot, the spot I used to occupy back when I had rights and dignity—looking utterly content, already renewing his lease in the Marina Empire for another fiscal year.
   I lie there for another five minutes, contemplating my choices. Contemplating my life. Contemplating whether I should just invest in a sleeping bag and set up camp in the living room.
     But I won’t. Because I love her. Because even after eight hours of territorial warfare, even after losing every square inch of space, even after being accused of bed treason in my sleep, I love her.
   And tonight, I’ll climb back into this bed.
     And the war will begin again.
   While Marina takes her three “exhaustion naps” while I’m at work, recovering from the terrible sleep she definitely didn’t get.