Hope Has a Headboard

by Don Hall

You don’t realize how much metaphor is stitched into the mattress until you’re divorced, sleeping on a couch, and contemplating the purchase of a new one. Scrolling through the mattress websites, wondering if it’ll fit in your tiny studio apartment, questions of headboard or no, it suddenly strikes like a bolt of lightning that this isn’t a consumer-driven exchange. It’s an attempt at resurrection.

Because no one goes looking for a bed after a divorce unless they believe—deep, dark, down where the lava lives—that they might sleep soundly again. That one day, they’ll stretch out in a space that doesn’t reek of betrayal and disappointment. That maybe, just maybe, the bed won’t be an emotional crime scene forever.

You’ve got to hope for something to browse the websites of bedding after a marital apocalypse.

Rewind the cassette tape. Divorce isn’t a clean break (whether it takes two years to untether or a three-day quickie split in Nevada). It’s the slow-motion demolition of a building you were still living in. You don’t just lose the person you married; you lose the soundtrack of a certain period of your life, the inside jokes, the smell of shared detergent on your clothes. You lose your damn bed. That temple of late-night confessions, lazy Sunday screw sessions, and crying-alone-on-your-side-at-2am becomes either a haunted relic or a battlefield that belongs to your ex.

You leave with what fits in the Prius and a moving pod. Maybe a lamp. Maybe the coffee maker if you’re lucky. But the bed? The bed stays behind like a tombstone in a plot you no longer own.

So there you are, divorced and bedless. Crashing on the daybed you thought was a couch when you bought it. Sleeping with a comforter and a quilt stitched together by your (former) mother-in-law, clinging to pillows that smell like failure.. You start sleeping diagonally across whatever horizontal surface is available because suddenly your body doesn’t remember how to share space. And one morning—likely hungover, likely naked save for one sock—you open your laptop, type “beds near me,” and press enter.

And that’s when hope flares its stubborn little head.

Hope doesn’t arrive like a dove descending from the heavens. It doesn’t shout. It whispers. It’s the quiet voice that says, “You can have a bed that’s just yours. A place to dream. To heal. Maybe even to fuck again someday.”

You might not call it hope. You might call it “finally getting my shit together” or “sick of waking up with back pain.” But it’s hope. It’s the belief that the worst thing that’s ever happened to you is not the last thing that ever will.

A person without hope doesn’t buy a bed—they settle for futons. They sleep on floors. They half-commit to air mattresses that deflate slightly every night until they’re swallowed up in a sagging vinyl grave of self-pity. But the act of choosing a bed is an act of goddamn war against despair.

Because you are saying: I might be shattered, but I’m still going to be comfortable. I might be alone, but I’m not going to sleep in a coffin.

Memory foam? What the fuck does that mean and why would anyone decide to slap that horrible double meaning to a mattress? Might as well call it Failure Foam.

Because memory is the enemy right now. You don’t want a bed that remembers her laughter or the way her hair smelled when she fell asleep first. You don’t want it to know what it’s like to lie beside a breathing stranger who used to be your person. You want a bed with the memory of a goldfish. You want amnesia. You want ignorance.

You lie down and stare at the ceiling and wonder if this bed will hear you cry. If it will soak up your anxieties. If it will understand that what you really need is permission to rest without guilt. That you want to sink into something that doesn’t ask you where it all went wrong.

You think about it for a long time. You procrastinate. Then your mom calls you and tells you that your sister is incensed you’re sleeping on that daybed/couch (for FOUR YEARS) and has stubbornly and with fierce love, buying you a fucking bed. It occurs to you that she, in her way, continually finds ways to help you reclaim and reframe yourself. Encouragement to cook. Haircuts on the regular. And a bed.

Two days later, the bed arrives. You put it together, you take the reminder of the downfall out into the alley, and it disappears in a flash only the way a Chicago alley can resemble the Bermuda Triangle.

Yup. Kept that quilt.

The first night in the new bed is a strange one.

There’s too much room. You find yourself hugging one edge, leaving the other side untouched like a shrine. Old habits die hard. You don’t spread out yet. You don’t roll over into the emptiness. You just lie there, listening to the sound of nothing.

And then, slowly, you start claiming space. Inch by inch, dream by dream. You sleep diagonally, like you’ve earned it. You wake up without reaching for someone who isn’t there. You stop sleeping on your side like a question mark.

The bed becomes your confessional booth, your therapist’s couch, your sanctuary. You start reading again before sleep. You fall asleep to music instead of your own spiraling thoughts. You cry once in a while, but the mattress doesn’t judge. It holds you.

That, right there, is the purest form of hope. Not the loud fireworks of belief, but the quiet return of self.

You start waking up and thinking not just “I survived,” but “What’s next?”

Eventually, there will be another person.

You’ll bring someone home, hesitantly, sheepishly, like a teenager whose parents are out of town. You’ll make a joke about how firm the bed is. They’ll laugh. You’ll kiss. And in the silence between breath and heartbeat, the ghost of your ex will be there—but distant. Faded. Watching but not intervening.

And then, someone new will sleep in that bed.

You’ll realize with quiet astonishment that you don’t feel guilty. That the sheets have become yours, not hers. That this bed is not a monument to grief anymore but a cradle for possibility.

And when she (or he, or they) stirs in the middle of the night and pulls closer to you, you won’t think of the old bed, the old fights, the old hurt.

You’ll think, “Damn, this mattress was worth every penny.” And silently thank your sister. It’s a silent gratitude because thanking your sister while in bed with a fresh paramour might be construed as a massive red flag or at least an unintended kink.

Hope isn’t the triumphant anthem they sell you in pop songs and TED Talks. Hope is stubborn. It’s dumb. It doesn’t listen to logic or evidence. It doesn’t care about odds or history or how many times you’ve failed.

Hope shows up when you suddenly find yourself in your own bed after a gut-wrenching divorce and dare to believe that you might sleep well again. That someone might love you again. That you might love yourself again.

And when you wake up in that bed—after your first full night of sleep, after your first morning without dread, after your first coffee sipped while still sitting under the blanket—you’ll realize:

You’re choosing hope over bitterness. Rebirth over stagnation. Story over ending.

Because you didn’t crawl back into the bed you had with your ex. You didn’t collapse into a rented twin-size with a cigarette and a bottle of whiskey. You didn’t give up.

You own a new bed.

And you whispered the quietest, bravest thing a broken person can say:

“I’m not done yet.”