Unwanted cargo

What to do with a heavy load?

Fall, fight, cope, break free?

You know those mattresses that get mailed to you in a box, and when opened, they expand all on their own? Our twin one expanded. Our queen one did not.

Amazingly, the retailer arranged a return and a pickup.

But the shipping carrier never arrived on the arranged day for pickup.

So the retailer set up another date.

This time the carrier came and hauled away the mattress.

The next day my husband answered a call from the carrier. They couldn't ship the mattress—the driver was new and shouldn't have picked up such a big item. They'd return the mattress to us the next day.

“I guess just leave it in the driveway,” my husband said.

By then I was sick with a bad cold or the flu or who-knows-what, which always feels a little too close to the way I used to feel despair and dead inside, and I was reminded of the unidentifiable, stuck inner garbage that we sometimes can't seem to get rid of. And even when we think we've finally overcome it or left it behind, it returns. Like a queen-sized defective and dirty mattress.

Sick and slumped into an oversized chair watching romantic comedies on my laptop, enter: You've Got Mail. There was Joe Fox telling Kathleen Kelly to "go to the mattresses," a quote apparently from The Godfather, which means "to fight." I was going to have to fight over an actual mattress. I didn't want to think about it.

A few days later, still slumped in that oversized chair but with a little more brainpower, I started reading my overflowing inbox. Enter: Courtney Martin.

A lovely email that included something about coping and how the word cope surprisingly has roots from "come to blows." To fight.

Surprisingly I wasn't thinking about fighting anymore but blowing instead. Maybe "come to blows" could mean arriving at a blowing, like coming to the blows at a beach on a windy day.

And maybe it feels like coping because you're stable among all that's moving and blowing around you. You're either coping, or you’re blown. Blown—another way to describe feeling despair and dead inside—blown over in a heap or blown out into bits, right there on the ground.

One way or another, we find ourselves on the stability of the ground.

An artist friend texted me a photo of a painting she was working on. All I could see was blown open. It turned out that she titled it She Broke Free.

Sometimes, it's from the ground that we break free.

PS The unwanted mattress mysteriously never returned to our driveway. It started moving, in the direction of the retailer, all while labeled "return to sender." It eventually arrived at its original destination. I got the refund. Blown away.

Complement with Riding the Wind and Checked Out.