I Hate My Girlfriend’s Body Pillow

The leopard print pillowcase. Okay. You love leopard print. I’m not crazy about it; I’m working on being okay with it. But not in bed. Our apartment, as a whole, has a minimalist aesthetic to it, painstakingly selected from the Ikea in Red Hook. Your pillowcase feels like Hoboken sitting in the middle of Brooklyn.

Three is a crowd. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but our bed is only a full. And this, coupled with your arbitrary “no pillows on the floor” rule, even when you’re not using them, leads to a really crowded situation in Sleepyland. Does your body pillow pay rent? Is it getting screwed by the debt ceiling compromise? No? Put it on the floor.

It undermines compromise in bed. Sometimes we haggle about the right way to sleep with each other based on sinus congestion and sore backs and desired body proximity. But the body pillow takes away my leverage to negotiate, and I’m always trumped – you can (and often do) default to it and make yourself comfortable while I get the shaft. It’s like always getting dealt the left and right bauers in a game of Euchre: with the body pillow, I’m going to need a four trump against you in order to have any semblance of hope at winning in bed.

It makes me feel like a dildo for your life. The second I climb out of bed, you snap up your body pillow and mold it to where I had been lying, and then you immediately fall asleep again. This makes me feel like you don’t really need me in bed; you just need a terraform of some kind to wrap your arms around to put your soul at ease.

It’s like you’re cheating on me in front of my eyes. After I get out of the shower, you’re still perfectly asleep with a slight smile on your face, canoodling the body pillow. My mind immediately drifts back to your former lovers – did you cradle them just like this?  Do you miss them? Do they have something that I don’t? Did you push their beards against the grain like you do mine? When you cling to that pillow, I feel like I’m peeking through a wormhole into your past. How can you ever possibly miss me in bed when I’m so easily replaced?

I know I’m not perfect – for the love of God, I’m the type of guy who will write a few hundred words about a pillow. And I recognize this. But that pillow burns me in the same way that my mentioning ex-girlfriend’s name hurts you. So I’ve modified my rhetoric, and I selfishly just wish that, for me, you could change this one little thing.

Or, at least get rid of the goddamn leopard pillowcase.

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