The Last Witness

This is a story of a piece of furniture, a couch to be exact. It was multicolored, contained more than one stain and, at the end, had springs sticking straight out through the back and into the wall. That's how it found itself in my garage for a couple years, and at the dump this weekend.

Let's back up to the summer of my junior year of college. I meet this girl, much to the distress of the girl I was dating at the time. This girl was grown up at a time when I was not, and for some reason, interested in spending time with me. One night, I got a call from this girl telling me she wanted to talk to me at her house. I had never been to her house, and in a long walk to my car, during which I turned around three times, I eventually found my way to her duplex. And we sat on her couch.

We talked about our situation and how we wanted to be together. And after a while of pacing around her house, during which I turned around more times than I cared to count, I sat down on the couch and kissed her. One of my favorite topics when I write (especially the short ficlets I've talked about on this blog) is the moment when people get together. I find that exercise fascinating, and while I might come off like a cheap romance writer, I think the dynamics of people taking a step into something, especially if they've known it's coming for a long time, is ripe with possibility. I also really like the topic because I suck so bad at that moment. I don't have one witty, interesting or good story about that moment, except on that couch. Please forgive me, but I'm going to keep it private as the girl I kissed on that couch is now my wife of 8 years.

There's much more to that story that I also don't care to discuss, but I soon got to know that couch very well. I remember one Saturday a couple months after we'd gotten together, we woke up at noon, ordered pizza and sat around watching a Daria marathon on MTV until dinner time when we decided maybe we should get out of the house. Then we didn't.

That couch survived a few trips - from college to the trailer we moved in when first married, to the new house we now live in, but the spring sticking out of the back and scratching the wall did it in and it sat in the garage for a good two years. Mice got into it and by the time we cleaned the garage this weekend in a 10-hour whirlwind of trips to the dump, grisly discoveries involving vermin and heavy lifting which left vertebra in places vertebra should not be, it was out of the garage and in the dump.

The couch was the second heaviest thing we moved, and I managed to get it end over end into a pile of debris. I hadn't given what that couch had meant to me a second thought until, as we drove away, my wife said simply "bye old friend," to the couch.

Oh yeah. That couch is where my family started.

And now its in the dump, replaced by a formerly white couch where my dogs have shredded one part of one cushion and where stains from markers and squash baby food will never come out. It's not a matter of needing to move on, it's a matter of remembering a place where you used to be, acknowledging it and feeling the weight of time at bit. It feels like an eternity ago and yesterday. The emotions are still vivid as hell - the fear, the excitement, the fear, the arousal, the fear, the spinning of the head, the fear.

That couch was where my family started.

Bye, old friend.