Under the Bed
I wasn’t trying to remember anything. I was just lying flat under my own bed at 53, reaching for last night’s hairband. But the angle, the quiet, the smallness — my body recognised something before my mind did. It was like a door opened without knocking.
And suddenly I was eight again.
I remembered the bunk beds. The narrow space underneath. Not comfortable, not warm, but mine. A place to hide when I was afraid, or when I didn’t want to be found. Trauma wipes the early years clean, but it leaves outlines, and that outline was the underside of a bed.
I remembered my closest brother pulling the big ugly 70's bear out of the way — the one with the rubbed nose and picked-off eyes — so he could crawl in beside me. I remembered him telling me something was happening. I remembered us looking out the window. The police car. The shouting. Something breaking. No dialogue, just impact.
I don’t know where the other brothers were. I only remember him. And me. And the bed.
I think I hid there because it was the only place that made sense. The world was too loud, too unpredictable, too full of adults who never explained anything. A small space has edges. You can manage edges. You can breathe in edges.
Maybe shrinking the world made it safer. Maybe taking up less space made me less of a target. Maybe I just needed somewhere no one could suddenly appear shouting.
I didn’t have a safe space, so I built one.
My dog used to crawl under the bed during thunder. He’d wedge himself right underneath me, pressed into the same smallness I once used. I made him safe. I didn’t have that safety myself, but I knew how to create it for him. Maybe that’s the saddest part — I learned to comfort others long before anyone learned to comfort me.
My father died at 52. I’d just had my second child. I never thought to ask him why — why the police came, why the shouting, why the silence afterwards, why he never showed up emotionally, why he gave me back a present because he didn’t have one for me, why he told me he didn’t buy me birthday cards and didn’t pretend otherwise. I hated him, then pitied him. I don’t remember loving him. That part is sealed away in the no‑memory years before seven.
Now, at 53, the memory sits differently. Not gone — just unfrozen. I say I’m claustrophobic, but maybe I’m not. Maybe I just refuse small spaces. Maybe I won’t ever again put myself somewhere I had to hide to survive. Maybe it’s not fear — maybe it’s a boundary.
Reflection does that. It shows you what was actually happening, not what you thought was happening. It clears the fog.
Sometimes all it takes is lying under a bed, reaching for a hairband, and finding a child you didn’t know was still there.
Footnote - If I’m honest, I don’t actually know if my brother was there that day. He might have been at a neighbor's house with the others, not knowing anything was happening. Maybe it was just me — alone under the bed, at the window, with my own inner monologue for company. Neurodiverse, undiagnosed, always thinking, always narrating. Maybe the only witness to that moment was me.
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