As a proud Cornell student and responsible youth, I care about crime. Stealing is mean and I would certainly not do it. People break into people’s rooms and that is scary because if it could happen to them, it could happen to me, and I do not want that to happen to me. Perhaps hiding under another’s bed while sleeping is something someone may do, and that—like all crime—is bad.
As a mature and rational young adult, I was of course concerned of such a happenstance occurring in my place of residence. I looked over to my roommate’s bed and saw, to my horror, so much wide open space—a smooth floor just waiting to be laid on! Luckily, my under-the-bed conditions are considerably different. My roommate sometimes calls me “a dirtbag” and tells me “he thinks he hears rats under there”, and I am so glad that we have similar senses of humor and are able to joke around like that. Little does he know that any stranger can at any point be under his bed—even, perhaps, while he is laying on it.
Like all average, busy, hard-working undergraduates preparing to enter the workforce, I do not always have time to keep my room as neat and tidy as I would like. Would that I collect an unexpected amount of flyers from some spontaneous Club Fest event, or check out artsy and mysterious library books that I would like to like to enjoy, or discover a curious sweatshirt left by a friend that I mean to give back but always seem to forget… where am I to stow such a myriad of miscellaneous items if not under the very place I lay my most vulnerable? I have accepted that once something perhaps rolls underneath my bed or falls down the side, the universe meant for me to part ways with it. Lo and behold, the very objects that I never necessarily wanted but ultimately got, the crumbs on the floor that are not major enough for a vacuum but still noticeable enough in size and number, the bustling city of empty chip bags and dust underneath my bed—all have amounted to an ingenious, ecological, foolproof home security system this entire time! I surely would not want to lay down there, and I cannot imagine that an intruder would want to either.
Truthfully, it is a primal instinct to form a nest with all of life’s necessities, and I am but a creature of circumstances like any hygienic and normal person with a bed, space underneath a bed, and knickknacks with no place to go. Any hooligan who may intrude and may see my bed and may even be so compelled as to lay underneath it would at the same time see the spacious and clean quarters beneath my roommate’s bed, and thus definitely lay under there instead. Only a fearless, tactically-trained expeditioner, the likes of which this world has yet to see, could brave the rapidly developing ecosystem that occupies the area between my mattress and the floor. It has recently developed its own weather cycle and appears to be growing new life, as little whatnots and assorted thingamabobs seem to get there somehow. I am increasingly suspicious that anything anyone ever loses ends up under there, and I fear that soon I will no longer be able to handle its expansion.
But I can sleep safe and sound knowing that out of all the beds out there, no mischievous intruder could ever lay under mine.
