Years in the past, whereas on project, I interviewed a person who spent what felt like hours exhibiting me footage of the assorted couches he was considering of buying for his new residence. The couches had been ridiculous and summary, as if the sensible factor had been changed with the thought of itself. They had been lengthy and slim and metallic, or in any other case bulbous and overstuffed, like flesh completely impressed by the tight grip of a corset. I assumed he was deploying the couches as a form of symbolic shorthand–to point to me his wealth and his style, which clearly exceeded my very own.
Now, years later, as I discover myself within the midst of furnishing my very own new residence, I acknowledge in our change the telltale indicators of a psychology that has been corrupted by the existential downside of populating an empty house. Obsession, fixation, compulsive confession: these weren’t the signs of an enormous ego–they had been the signs of an ego that was being dissolved by inside design.
In November, on my first evening in a brand new condo, I turned satisfied that I wanted a white sofa, and that everybody in my life who had ever tried to dissuade me from shopping for one was merely hindered by their very own neurotic insecurity. The one individuals who fear about stains, I advised myself, are the individuals who lack the self management to not make them. My former roommate, very politely, inspired me to take a look at my white clothes as an indicator of the destiny of my would-be white sofa: all of it was noticed with brown or yellow or purple or inexperienced, a private ledger of each meal I had ever eaten. I advised myself {that a} shirt had no relation to a settee, and that the best way I acted in a single relationship with an inanimate object (neglectful, lazy) had nothing to do with the best way I might act in my relationship with the subsequent (attentive, caring, exact).
The following day, I drove to Beverly Hills and purchased an immaculate slip-covered sofa from a girl from the web named Lina, who described, in cautious element, the sofa’s requisite grooming routine. She appeared to really feel that the sofa’s covers had grown used to their pampering–month-to-month laundering, bleaching, steaming–and actually depended upon it to take care of their id. In some way, she made all of it sound really easy, the best way a dentist could make even a herculean feat like flossing appear elementary to the longevity of humankind. I didn’t know easy methods to use bleach, and I didn’t personal a steamer, however I used to be assured I might discover the means to supply the sofa with the circumstances it wanted to flourish. On Lina, I used the language I had been instructed, years earlier than, to make use of on the volunteers who head canine adoption businesses: I wouldn’t change the sofa to suit into my life; I might change my life to make room for the sofa.
I paid two guys to hold it up three flights of stairs and into my lounge, the place I hoped we’d stay fortunately ever after. However within the context of all my different stuff––the books, letters, crops, and out-of-use chargers that I had collected over the course of a few years–the sofa regarded offensive, idiotic, devoid of tradition. (Even now, as I attempt to bear in mind its shade, all I can suppose is: clean.) When the room was empty, it had been stuffed with potential. Now that it housed the sofa, its destiny appeared inflexible and decided, however concurrently vacuous, just like the never-ending journey of a plastic nub floating within the wide-open sea.
The sofa had nothing to do with me, and so I attempted desperately to power it onto another person. I divided everybody I encountered into two camps: folks I revered, and folks whose style I judged to be compromised sufficient that they may very well be satisfied that the sofa was valuable and mandatory––that they needed, and actually wanted, to take it out of my life and into their very own. At events, on the telephone, and over textual content, I began talking within the equivocating language of Craigslist advertisements, which rapidly morphed into the lobotomized language of unhealthy break ups: the sofa was lovely, nevertheless it didn’t work in my house; I beloved it, however was now not in love with it; it wasn’t it, it was me.
The sofa was me, which was a part of the issue: it mirrored again to me how little I knew about my very own needs, after which shamed me for permitting a mass-produced object to develop into a vessel for my sense of self. I feared I used to be dropping my originality, that I used to be merely a duplicate, born to repeat my mother and father’ worst errors (that they had raised me with among the ugliest couches on the earth). It didn’t assist that my father, after I had requested him for his opinion on the sofa earlier than shopping for it, advised me that it reminded him of the one he had simply purchased himself: “form of uncomfortable. wouldn’t advocate it for you.”
For the subsequent month, I posted advertisements on Craigslist, OfferUp, and Fb Market, however every time it bought to the purpose that somebody agreed to come back choose it up, I turned satisfied that they had been solely within the sofa insofar because it supplied them a sensible technique of coming into my life for the specific function of ending it. So, I might cease responding, after which start telling myself that my life was extra essential to me than my dislike of the sofa––that I may develop to like it, and even persuade it to vary. Sawing off the legs, dying the slip-cover: each appeared like probably groundbreaking alterations. However I by no means altered something, and so the sofa remained pristine, tidy, and white: an emblem of the entire unhealthy selections I had made in my previous, was making within the current, and would proceed to make lengthy into my meaningless future.
Finally, simply after Thanksgiving, a younger lady messaged me, telling me that she hoped to purchase the sofa for her mom, that it was––in truth––simply the factor her mom had been searching for. Her story, like the remaining, appeared utterly implausible to me. However I gave her my tackle anyway. She would come to my condo on Tuesday, and I might both survive the interplay or I wouldn’t, however in each eventualities one thing, mercifully, would stop to exist: myself, the sofa, or my infatuation with it.
Maya Binyam is a contributing editor at The Paris Evaluate.
