Rug Burn

Life is easier lived if you measure the room before buying the rug, or so I'm told

I didn’t consider how a 9” x 12” rug would fit into my apartment bedroom until I’d moved my bed, bed frame, piled all the plastic Ikea under-bed-storage bags into a precarious tower, and unfurled it. Or, tried to.

With at least two feet of the rug still snuggled into a roll kissing the far wall, I broke out the measuring tape. I don’t know what the measuring tape would’ve told me that I couldn’t already tell from the situation literally at my feet: The rug—red, Persian-inspired-yet-factory-made—did not—and would not ever—fit in this room.

Can you see the pain in her eyes?

I sat on the floor, on the rug, on the lost potential of what could have been.

The defeat coursed thick and muddy through me, settling in my chest like sludge. It wasn’t just the Facebook Marketplace misfire, I realized as I sat staring at the bedroom I’d torn apart and would need to put back together, but a lifetime lacking foresight.

It’s how I’ve injured myself my whole life: jumping out of trees and fracturing elbows, riding a LimeBike while plastered on Halloween and breaking my front teeth, not thinking critically about the unsecured ladder in the Mexico AirBnb and cushioning the ensuing fall with my head.