Some Couch

Some Couch


         For the first years of my life, I had lived with a single couch which looked as though my own parents had spied its speckled, white-washed facade protruding awkwardly out from under a black dumpster cover, and had decided to fish it out "for the family."  I can only recall single framed reels pertaining to it's gauche penetration into my life, yet I recall in a clarity above that of perfection, that from the first time I slid my Old Navy, white-striped shorts slowly up onto the itchy, uneven cushions; I hated it.

         It took but a single day to find out everything that was wrong about this parcel of furniture.  For starters, the pillows were Styrofoam: they weren't "cushy" enough for my well-developed tastes; the little bits of green and blue that dotted it's visage, when subject to a meager amount of picking, were easily removed and proceeded to dangle unattractively in the little frayed fibers which strayed from it's mismatched stitching; and when you sat down after a long day of running and laughing, disregarding the itchy sensations that begin to spring up on the back of your neck, arms, and legs, disregarding the repulsive exterior that caused your eyes to twitch after a single look, that was when the smell took hold: moth balls and wet dog, Campbell's cream of mushroom and mildew, a hint of garlic, a touch of beetlejuice, and the slightest insinuation of puke, all combined and catalyzed until you either barfed or flung yourself dizzily from the scaffold.  But the most horrible affliction yet, the utmost in pure evil, the paramount of malevolence, the ultimate in iniquity, vice, and wickedness: from everywhere you sat upon it's feeble skin, a glare, long a foul, stretched its maw across the thirty-inch screen of our hand-me-down Panasonic.  This was unacceptable.

         I pleaded my mother a father to correct their insanity, to stop this sentient evil from further displacing the family's goals, but they wouldn't comply, and didn't suffer my beseeching for much longer.  The couch was here to stay, and did so with silent maliciousness.

         Yet, many things happen as you least expect, just as many things happen to a child of seven.  My great-grandmother died from lung cancer at the end of 1997 and created the first callus upon my heart, my father got his first job out of law school working for a friend as a defense attorney, my sister was born, I had to get rushed to the emergency room when I split my head open, the family finally found a good church, my mother began to attend AA meetings starting a long journey to a clean soul, and the first inklings of divorce began placing themselves in the arguments between father and mother.  Throughout all of this the couch sat in silent reverence, regarding its owners with an inexplicable and affectionate repose.  And it was here, and this point in time, which irony stepped in: we moved.  With the money my father was making we could now afford better, we could upgrade from that nasty old couch, it's white-washed, speckled facade.  Yet, although I now detained a clandestine adoration for its uneven cushions, I bit my tongue, I remained silent up until I saw its off-white, blue and green dotted cushions peeking curiously out from under our black dumpster cover--as I left 131, Family Housing forever--that was when I spoke: "Goodbye."

         May it's memories live on forever.

~End.