Comfortable

Shortly after my ex left, I decided to get a new couch. It wasn’t just about reclaiming my space, though that played no small role in the decision. The upholstery on my old red couch, purchased not long after I bought my house, was worn thin. The microfiber was an absolute magnet for dog hair, even though Harley the Dog does not jump on the furniture. The stuffing had shifted and settled and flattened, there was no reviving it. I loved that big red couch, but at 15 years old, it was time for it to go.

My friend B. joined me at the mall. We shuffled around furniture showrooms until I found something I liked. I settled on a beautiful peacock blue leather sofa, smaller and more upright than the squishy red couch, and had the red couch hauled away, along with a bunch of other furniture that was just taking up space.

The new sofa arrived, handsome and adult, and then I promptly stopped using the living room. It took me some time to realize this. One evening I was watching a movie on my laptop in bed and I thought, “What am I doing? Why aren’t I sitting in the living room on my handsome leather couch?”

My living room has large windows that face northwest. One of the best things about this house is that open northwest space and from the day the red couch arrived, I loved sitting in the front room watching the light change. I realized, propped up in bed with the laptop on my knees, that it had been months, maybe a year, since I’d sat in the front room and watched the sky turn from pale blue to streaky orange to darker blue. Or watched the light come up in the morning, coffee in hand.

“I gotta get rid of that couch,” I thought.”What a boring, pedestrian, suburban problem to have.”

The blue leather sofa sold almost immediately on Facebook Marketplace. I had some trepidation about the process; internet randos can be, well, so random. But the people who wanted it couldn’t have been nicer. They showed up with a truck, a guy to help with the lifting, a stack of cash, and hauled it away.

For a while my living room looked very college; I had a big Ikea lounge chair and a footstool, both scavenged from garage sales or my neighborhood Buy Nothing group or, who can remember. Some evenings I propped my laptop on the low bookcase to watch a movie, and some evenings I drank tea and looked out the window at the sky. It was an improvement.

I took myself back to the mall furniture stores where I eyed the Danish modern pieces and the oversized department store sectionals and the expensive custom leather numbers that mostly came in multiple shades of brown. Armed with dimensions and a roll of tape to mark out how much sofa my living room could hold, I turned to the internet where I could not make myself buy a couch without first having a good sprawl on it to see how it felt. I dragged myself back to the palaces of furniture commerce and finally found something that was not prohibitively expensive, fit my space, and came in almost the same peacock blue of the sofa I’d just gotten rid of.

The new sofa arrived while I was away for the winter; my house sitter handled the delivery. She sent me photos and assured me the color was very nice, though it filled the space in a way I would have to solve for — which I have since done.

The first afternoon I was home after my winter away, I stretched out on the new couch under a quilt my mom had made and fell asleep. I am sitting here now as I type; the sky is still a bit yellow at the horizon while above it is a velvety royal blue.

It’s all set up just right, the speaker is close to where I’m sitting so the sound is good. The TV is over there, so I can lounge with my feet on the couch and watch whatever it is I’m watching, be it seven minutes of Bluey because I need that kind of sweetness in my media diet, or an hour and a half of long shadows and bad decisions and very, very big cars. When I finish these inconsequential words about my new sofa, I will get a cup of tea, sit down again and finish watching another 1940s film noir, an obsession I picked up last winter while watching movies in bed.

It is so good to be home, so good to be comfortable. It is good to find that my problems, so big for so long, have diminished to solvable ones. How luxurious it is to sit and watch the day arrive or depart. How luxurious to feel at home again.