I went camping again this weekend. No, I have not changed the futon out for an air mattress. Yes, my back hurts.
The end… of the weekend anyways.
I am now back home and can sleep in a bed that has at least some recognizable layer of padding between me and the structural components underneath it. A futon is supposed to provide support. This one feels like it should be marketed as foundation material rather than anything involving the word comfort.
I don’t need a fridge. I don’t need a bathroom, a port-a-potty works. I don’t even need Wi-Fi, although someone at the campground apparently brought Starlink, which seems like cheating.
But I’m supposed to sleep on something marketed as the next evolutionary step above the ground and call it comfortable?
The next camping trip will involve an air mattress. That air mattress may have a backup. Comfort is now paramount when it comes to sleeping quarters.
Anything else is just uncivilized.
But somewhere during the weekend, I started thinking about comfort beyond the thing that was slowly rearranging my spine.
I spent two days camping with my girlfriend, which meant there was a lot of time without the normal distractions of everyday life. No work we were particularly interested in doing. No place we particularly needed to be. No schedule beyond figuring out when we wanted to eat, where we wanted to go, and how long we could tolerate sitting around the campsite before deciding to do something else.
And we talked. Not just the easy conversations either.
We had some deeper conversations about ourselves, our relationship, things we need, things we worry about, and some of the experiences that made us who we are. The kind of conversations where you occasionally stop and think, Do I really want to say this out loud?
Some of it was uncomfortable.
I’ve spent a lot of my life believing that comfort meant avoiding those moments. If everyone is getting along, nobody is upset, and nothing difficult needs to be discussed, then everything must be good.
I had that backward.
Each time we wandered into one of those uncomfortable conversations this weekend, something interesting happened. We didn’t run from it. We didn’t immediately try to fix it. We talked. We listened. We asked questions. Sometimes we clarified what we actually meant instead of assuming the other person should magically understand it.
And afterward, I felt more comfortable with her, not less.
That’s a strange little contradiction. Sometimes becoming more comfortable with someone requires being willing to get uncomfortable with them first.
There are things that are easy to say when you’re trying to present the best version of yourself. Then there are the things you say when you’re beginning to trust that someone wants to know the actual version.
The actual version has fears. It has insecurities. It has history. It occasionally says the wrong thing and then has to back up and try again. It has needs that aren’t always particularly easy to explain. It has scars, quirks, bad habits, and apparently an irrational willingness to sleep on a futon that should probably be investigated by the Geneva Convention.
Being comfortable around her doesn’t mean I don’t care what she thinks of me.
Quite the opposite.
It means I’m becoming comfortable enough to let her see the parts of me that I’m not entirely sure what to think about myself. And I feel like she’s becoming comfortable showing me those parts of herself too.
I think that’s where comfort starts becoming something different from familiarity. Familiarity is knowing how someone takes their coffee, what makes them laugh, which foods they hate, or what they’re probably going to say before they say it.
Unless, of course, you memory of a goldfish.
Comfort is knowing I can say, This is what I’m feeling, even when what I’m feeling is messy. It’s being able to ask a difficult question without assuming the question itself is going to damage what we’re building. It’s being able to hear an answer without immediately becoming defensive.
And sometimes it’s sitting quietly beside each other afterward while a campfire burns down and realizing that nothing broke.
Actually, something got stronger.
Maybe that’s the kind of comfort I’m learning to appreciate now. Not a life without uncomfortable moments, but having someone beside me with whom I can safely have them.
Physical comfort, however, remains nonnegotiable.
I’m capable of difficult conversations. I’m capable of vulnerability. I’m capable of discussing feelings, fears, relationships, the past, and the future.
But I’m fifty-something years old, and I have discovered a boundary.
It’s that fucking futon.