The Gift of the Guest Bed
Last weekend, I played host to a guest and spent three days running around half drunk and half hungover trying to make sure we showed up everywhere on time and that my friend was taken care of. Exhausting as it was, I loved every second of it. I love when people come to visit. It’s something that has seemed to happen very rarely, or even by complete accident, in every place I’ve ever lived. But as of late, that’s changing.
When I first toured the apartment I’m currently living in, part of what I liked, aside from being able to live alone, was the fact that it was a two bedroom. I had visions of turning the second bedroom into the office of my dreams, with floor to ceiling bookshelves, a secretary desk where I could keep my typewriter, a massive wide-backed reading chair. It still serves as my office, though there is instead a narrow desk I picked up from my cousin and a small low bookshelf my mother found at a flea market. But when the beginnings of the move out of my parents’ house and into the apartment began to take shape, my mother said, “We can take that extra twin mattress we have, and that wicker headboard I have in the garage, and we can turn it into a daybed in the spare room. You could use it as a guest bed too.” And voilà, now there’s an actual bed for guests and drunks alike to rest their little heads should they find themselves in my company until late in the evening.
I’ve never been shy about offering up my home if someone is visiting and needs a place to stay. At one point I had a futon, and another an air mattress I had no idea how to actually inflate. There’s a horror story from my time in Wyoming when two friends came to visit and I had no batteries for the pump for the air mattress and couldn’t find any when I went driving around after maybe 10 p.m. because almost nowhere was open, so my ex-boyfriend who was back in town and crashing at my house had to help me pull the spare mattress he’d left me with (among many other things) out of the weird storage closet that also housed the water heater. “Humiliated” doesn’t even begin to cover it.
So, of course, I was absolutely ecstatic about the guest bed, and continue to be. I’ve had friends from out of town finally come visit because I can give them a place to stay, friends in town who have crashed after a long night out or when something has gone wrong at their place, and friends who just know there’s a bed open in my home if they need one. It makes me proud, being able to offer that alongside breakfast and coffee in the morning. I love having people in my house. That’s what it’s supposed to be for: visiting.
It does make me wonder though, why I feel so uncomfortable asking a friend if they can lend me their couch to sleep on.
I’ve always felt uncomfortable asking someone if I could stay with them. It feels like an imposition, an intrusion, or something you only ask of someone who you feel extremely close to. Asking an acquaintance in a distant city if I can crash at their place on my visit to town or my way through? The very idea of it makes me want to curl up in shame. Once, when I was trapped in the Denver airport for the night during a Thanksgiving snowstorm, it took me nearly two hours to work up the nerve to ask an acquaintance, “Could I maybe sleep on your couch?” I was only able to ask because of course, it was an emergency.
My parents are always suggesting to me that I travel more, that it can’t be that expensive when I know so many people spread out across the country. I could ask them for a place to stay, right? It’s a difficult task to explain to your parents that, no, you don’t really have friends, just a bunch of tenuous acquaintanceships you don’t feel comfortable imposing upon or trying to solicit favors from. And when people offer up their couches, their homes, do they mean it? What would they say if I actually took them up on it? People say things they don’t mean and offer things they can’t give all the time.
I have never felt that I have been a very good friend. I become overzealous early, with too many big ideas that lead to being unable to meet the ridiculous expectations I’ve set for myself. I have grand ideas for extravagant favors, big gestures to show I care, and when I can’t complete them, everyone ends up disappointed. I burn myself out before I even get started. I feel a lot of guilt about this, in addition to the guilt I feel about continually unloading my own messy existence onto others.
I guess asking someone if they can share their space with you for a night, to me it not only feels like what I am asking is a deep imposition, but a direct manifestation of my fear that I am a burden. What have I given this person? How have I cared for this person? Anything? And if not, then why do I feel like I can ask them for something?
It comes down to, I think, figuring out what someone wants to use their space for, rather than what your relationship to that person is. At least that’s how it is for me. I have no qualms about opening up my home to someone, anyone, no matter how tenuous the relationship. Have we not spoken in a while but were once close? Fine. Have we only ever talked at parties? Also fine. Mortal enemies? Maybe not ideal, but perhaps we can work something out. But I know not everyone feels this way, and it makes me far too uncomfortable to ask.
In the end, my home, my hospitality, it feels like the one thing I have, the one thing I can not only freely offer, but offer with all my attention. I find warmth in being cared for, in being made coffee in the morning or offered some small form of recognition, and so I also find warmth in caring for others. Let me make you coffee and give you clean sheets. Let me talk with you in to the early morning or let you retire to your room before eight, whichever you prefer. Let me give you the last piece of toast, and though I won’t be able to send you off in the morning because you should be allowed to sleep in, I hope you walk out the door into the morning feeling like you’ve been cared for. Because I know that isn’t too much to ask.