In my bed at night with me, there might be any number of odds and ends. Right now there are bits of leather that fell from my worn Bible cover, a fortune cookie message that reads "you will become more passionate and determined about your convictions," and a shirt that somehow worked its way down to the foot. There have been times when a day's worth of clothes, photographs, my house keys, books, and even church programs have been strewn randomly about my sleeping space. Not on top of the bed, mind you, but somehow under the covers, often unbeknownst to me.

I don't think of myself as a messy person, and many times my bed is also perfectly rid of any such nonsense and clutter, but I don't mind it terribly, for example, when I roll over onto the book I'm currently reading, or find a print out of an e-mail under my pillow, or when I find my favourite shirt draped across my calves.

It gives me a benign sense of my own foibles, my own harmless idiosynchrasies. Some people never wash out their coffee cup at work, some people only eat half of a cookie from a communal plate (something I find to be incredibly rude, by the way), or tear up bits of paper because they need to keep their hands occupied.

It comforts me to have things that are occupying my time, or that occupy a place in my heart, in bed with me. No pun intended. I also talk to myself. I do not mind thoughtful silences in a conversation with a friend, but I do not like silence, as a rule. I have to have music or the ambient sound of other people talking around me at all times because it superimposes a feeling of normalcy into my routine. I think of silence as the forerunner of danger.