It was a year ago that I moved out of the house I shared with my last boyfriend, the V.H.B.P.D. **

I moved from our spacious 3-bedroom railroad flat in San Francisco to a quiet, tiny, cozy studio cottage in Mill Valley. It was a drastic and depressing change for many reasons, one of the more minor ones being that I went from sleeping on a nice modern platform bed—like an adult with good taste, to sleeping on a mattress on the floor again—like a college student. (No offense to college students. It’s just that I’m 39.)

The nice platform bed, alas, had belonged to the V.H.B.P.D., at least as far as he was concerned. He built the thing with his own bare hands, actually, so that was fair. Except if you consider the fact that he launched this entire project on a whim one fine Sunday in a desperate attempt to get out of helping me deep-clean our enormous apartment like he had promised to do. “Honey,” he said, “Why don’t I build us a bed while you clean the toilet?” So I cleaned the house for about five hours while he smoked pot and hammered shit in the bedroom. It seemed like a fair trade. Until I moved out. “The bed is mine,” he coldly informed me.

The other bed — the cheap IKEA jobber we had been sleeping on before — was evidently also his. I was dismayed that my two-plus years of indentured emotional servitude as his live-in girlfriend, accountant, maid and social worker did not qualify me to receive any of the spoils of our “divorce.” Nevertheless, I left both beds (and basically everything else) in his flat and I lugged my hand-me-down eco-mattress with me to my new home in the woods, where I laid it on the floor.

Before I had moved in with V.H.B.D.P. I had a bed of my own, but it was nothing to brag about.

It was a contraption that I fashioned from an old janky futon frame and a large piece of plywood. Nevertheless, it served the purpose of lifting my mattress off the floor so that the proper amount of feng shui energy could circulate around me while I slept. But when I moved in with the person I naively thought I would spend the rest of my life with, I chucked that whole mess in the nearest dumpster without compunction. Onward and upward.

So when I found myself back on the floor again, a year ago, I had to humbly admit defeat in my mission to acquire decent adult furniture (not to mention my mission to make that relationship work). For this last year, there I’ve slept—rolling out of bed onto the carpet in the morning and occasionally having to sweep the various critters that infest my country house away from my bedding. (The short hop, slither, or flight from the floor has proved way too tempting for the wide variety of wildlife my cats drag in.)

Last week marked my one-year anniversary in this cottage. Next year I turn 40. I’ve moved what feels like hundreds of times since I left college. I’ve managed to keep my possessions to a streamlined minimum based more on practicality than sentimental fervor. Every piece of furniture in my apartment was given to me by a sympathetic friend or purchased cheap and haphazardly off of Craig’s List.

I woke up the other morning and decided that it’s time.

It’s time for me to sleep in a real bed. I can’t be waiting around for another V.H.B.P.D. to come into my life and make me another amateur homemade bed.  I bought a real, professional bed today. And the coolest thing about it? I didn’t have to clean anyone’s toilet to make it happen. I didn’t have to compromise at all, in fact. I picked out exactly the bed I wanted, and I paid for it all by myself, with my very own Amex:

** Volatile Hungarian with Borderline Personality Disorder. We all know one. I just happened to date one.