The mattress that kept going back upstairs

Written in Ohrid, July 2021. Typed up today.

The mattress had a dip on the left side where someone heavier than me had slept for years. I kept rolling into it.

Ohrid was the third place I’d stayed that week. I’d taken a bus through mountains and arrived after dark. The landlady showed me up a narrow stairway without switching on the light. She pointed at the bed, the bathroom, the kettle. The window looked over a street where someone sold things from a folding table. Then she left.

After two nights of waking in the dip, I pulled the mattress off the frame and put it on the floor. Tile, cold even in July. I slept better.

I went out for coffee at a place that only did takeaway. When I came back, the mattress was on the bed again. The frame was wood, the kind that creaked when you turned over.

I moved it back down. She moved it back up. This went on for days. I think she thought the floor was bad for me, or maybe a woman on the floor looked like something had gone wrong. Neither of us mentioned it. She left folded towels on the bed each morning. I left them on the chair.

I’d written about a morning swim in the lake and that afternoon I meant to write about the mattress. But the heat made me lazy. The lake was close and the water was the colour of something I didn’t have a word for. I went swimming instead.

On the fifth day I gave up. I left the mattress where she’d put it. She smiled at me in the stairway that evening. I smiled back.

That’s all I wrote down.