The flat complex which I lived in for about a year had six and a half floors, the half being something I think you can call a roof garden if some patches of grass and a nice view is enough to define it like that. If you pressed the lowest number in the lift, it would take you all the way from our own industrial heaven to the very bottom of the building. This is where you could find a combination of different class cars and, most glamorously, the bins. If the building I lived in would take part in a Shakespeare play, these two floors distinguishable in character would romantically symbolise the living and the dead, the beginning and the end, the remembered and the forgotten. Whereas the roof garden was a place to come together and enjoy the evening sun or hide from your daughter while having a cigarette, the bins and everything that was scattered around marked the end of a story, a life that used to be lived there, every object that was thrown away being a reminder of what once was. The lift served as somewhat of a grim reaper of the building, collecting what used to be the signature of someone’s life, only for it to be taken down and eventually be forgotten.
One of the most common pieces I’ve seen being thrown away in an attempt to move on or move in is the sofa. It is the most necessary item of a welcoming living room, perhaps even the foundation of this space where friends and family come together to share what’s been going on in their lives, while also sharing the sofa itself. It embodies family, community, and our need to come together with people, whether that means sitting on the sofa to watch a film that will later on be discussed heavily, or just to have a place where everyone can sit and eat their post-night out takeaway in peace. People might have gathered around that sofa you now see deteriorating near the bins, to tell the people closest to them some important news that would change everyone’s lives. In other instances, it might have been the case that it was a physical welcome for friends and family overseas, and in others just a temporary home for you and that very intimate friend you’ve brought over because you never made it to the bed.
But it’s also a place of relaxation and quality time with oneself, a place to seek refuge from everyday life and even your own bedroom. It’s the perfect excuse to get into a horizontal position in the middle of the day without feeling like you’re lying down to sleep. Its versatility gives us the creative freedom to create whatever we want in the living centre of our homes. There might have been times where it was the working space for an aspiring artist, or the office of a writer who lost himself in the web of his own words and imagination. For others, being comforted by their sofa might have been an essential part of their morning routine, while quietly slurping their coffee and flipping through pages of their newspaper, or balancing their breakfast plate on top of crossed legs. Especially for the lonely amongst us, the sofa can serve as a stuffed therapist, that might not give great advice, but is at least always there to comfort you and listen when no one else is willing to do so. Even if some tears roll down once in a while, you can be sure that your sofa is there to catch them all for you and dry up before you know it.
I was thinking of these things as we stood there in the lift together. Me, as usual, squished into the very corner, defying all laws of space, and two guys holding on to the sofa while the third one pretended to do so, too. They all seemed too young to be ready to move out, judging by the fact that they didn’t even seem ready to move out of puberty yet. Neither did they seem to have the money to refurbish their flat considering that I had seen evidence of them spending all their money on beer and takeaway pizza numerous lift journeys prior to that day. I couldn’t believe that they were ready to give up a sofa, that has got the stories of more than just that of the owner’s woven deeply into its fabric. I don’t think they realised that with its death, it didn’t just indicate the expiry of the owner’s current home, but also the ending of the last chapter of a book, killing all its characters in it. Maybe they wanted to finish this last chapter in order to start a new one. Who knows? It could be that one of them tried to get rid of a painful past, the memory of many first kisses, perhaps even the day he had to let go of the people those first kisses belonged to. Maybe one of them received terrible news on that sofa, or they couldn’t get rid of that one stain which brought back memories of a night none of them wanted to remember.
But the more I looked at it, the more I convinced myself that I was wrong. There was something else about it that I simply couldn’t put into words, something different than what I had been thinking in those two minutes to the sofa’s grave. In this case, it didn’t seem as if any of them tried to get rid of a difficult past, or a painful memory. There were no signs that either of them were particularly attached to this symbol of life anymore, regardless of how many stories it had starred in. No signs of joy over a new beginning, or signs of sadness over the closing of a painful chapter could be seen on their faces. This time, it didn’t seem as if the owners showed even the slightest signs of grief over the death of their old sofa, and the ending of an era. There didn’t seem to be an emotional reason to get rid of what once accompanied them in their everyday lives. No remorse. No grief. In this case, it was nothing more and nothing short of just plain ugly.
