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POINT OF VIEW

There is a special pathos to a mattress discarded by the roadside. In documenting them, social-media diarists show us who we are, naked and alone

When writer Matthew J. Trafford started documenting abandoned mattresses on his Instagram page, he was surprised to find others doing the same thing from Berlin and Amsterdam to Sydney and Mumbai.

Linda Besner’s most recent book is Feel Happier In Nine Seconds. She lives in Montreal.

My mattress is a cream-and-gold floral queen from St-Narcisse, Que. Her Highness is polyurethane foam covered with 69-per-cent rayon and 31-per-cent olefin, which, her étiquette announces frostily, is disclosed in accordance with The Upholstered and Stuffed Articles Act. She has eight porthole air vents, round and shiny as buttons, and four fabric handles, as if she were a 1920s hatbox voyaging by train through the Alps. I've shared a room with the queen for two years, but this is the first time I've asked her about herself.

She arrived in the usual way, manhandled up the steps by a previous owner – the casualty of a happy relationship, she was booted out when my sister and her boyfriend moved in. I accepted her, covered her with a sheet, and forgot her.

Right now, sleep is being created as a category – so Philip Krim, the CEO of the mattress startup Casper, recently told Fortune magazine. In the same way that Nike invented paying too much for sneakers, and Lululemon invented carrying a yoga mat everywhere, Casper is seeking to reinvent sleep as a hip lifestyle. The company, with its ubiquitous subway ads and podcast sponsorships, has opened up a market for online mattress purchase, and a spate of imitators has rushed to create their own bed-in-a-box products.

Near-identical rectangles are oddball candidates for social-media fame, but (assisted by the kink for unboxing videos), companies have successfully manufactured a craze for mattress chatter on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

Our passion for mattresses coincides with an epidemic of sleeplessness. In September, Statistics Canada reported that about a third of Canadians sleep less than the recommended amount (between seven and nine hours). A 2013 Gallup poll found that Americans had collectively lost an hour of sleep since the 1940s.

Our culture of overwork has us wearing the bags under our eyes as badges of professional success. Going against the grain, Casper and its imitators are now vying to fetishize sleep as a prestige item for young professionals, and mattresses as trendy self-care.

A few years ago, a friend of mine, the writer Matthew J. Trafford, started photographing abandoned mattresses he skirted on his way to work. Beached whales rising from the morning mist, they propped their blocky heads on the sidewalk and sang of their invisible lives of service. He posted them on his Instagram, with hashtags like #mattressoftheday, #mattresswatch and #somanymattresses.

To his surprise, he started getting messages from other chroniclers of these untold stories. There is a @mattressesofparis, a @mattresses_ofsydney and a @mattresses_of_amsterdam. There's @berlinmattress, @urbanmattresses and @mattresses_on_the_street.

To my eye, the cathartic allure of abandoned mattress portraiture lies in its valorisation of failure. Where the promoted photos of companies like Casper show eager mattresses springing from their Breton-striped boxes, invigorated by capitalism, the sad mattresses of Instagram show what it feels like to be let go. If Dec. 25 can be considered a grand Unboxing Day, the aftermath, sooner or later, is trash.

Out of place, grotesque in its bareness and vulnerability, the wandering mattress is a Chaplinesque Everyperson, miming the strange fate that waits in the shadows for all of us.

As the figure of the marooned mattress traces its Grand Tour, its positioning within the frame of the snapshots offers us a glimpse into the street life of cities for such a traveller.

In Amsterdam, an uptilted white rectangle rests on mossy brickwork before the curved face of the Nationale Opera & Ballet; a fringe of parked bicycles threads in between.

Melbourne sees a stack of four in creamy pink and yellow like some unpleasant marshmallow sandwich dropped by the shore of a body of water; behind, four male rowers in matching team onesies celebrate the end of a race.

In Skyros, Greece, a mattress of which nothing is left but the rusted springs is braced against a barbed-wire fence – we view the arid landscape through rows of spindly wormholes.

On a street in Rio di Janeiro, half of a flowered brown surface bears a queen-sized face – a profile of a woman painted expertly in black-and-white hatching.

As proxies for our bodies, the angle and bearing of the mattress speaks to how bravely we will meet our own obsolescence. A black cherry loner in Mumbai clasps its knees to its chest, balanced with dignity on a metal tube.

A contorted yellow foam in the Neukolln neighbourhood of Berlin grimaces like a bird's skeletal head.

In London, a scruffy congregation slumps companionably in an alley, resting its elbows on restaurant cans of cooking oil.

In the urban forest of the German capital, an unremarkable white slab breaks from its lifelong humility to soar in the high branches of a tree; it brings us hope that all beings, however seemingly ill-adapted for freedom, carry within themselves the possibility of flight.

The roadside mattress is generally an object of disgust; its stains, real and imagined, brand it untouchable, and clinging intimations of infestation have us reflexively scratching the ghosts of bedbugs for blocks. In their attention to the pathos of that which is repudiated, these social-media mattress diarists show us ourselves, naked and alone. We evade sleep because we think our achievements will outlast us; in their final hours, our mattresses take on the nobility of our defeat.


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