Old Furniture, Origin Stories, and a Home Made of Memories
“The thing I love about your apartment,” he says, looking at the whole of my studio from a perch in the corner, “is that it’s like you. Every single part of it has its own story.” I laugh at first, the kind of one-note Yeah, OK ha-ha that’s equivalent to a good-natured eye roll. But as I scan my space, I realize he’s right.
Each of the pieces of art framed on my walls has a back story. There’s an oil painting of a small boat done by grandmother, a talented artist who insisted her art was just a hobby; when she died, we found dozens of incomplete paintings, pieces of parchment rolled up & stored in a desk drawer and forgotten. There’s a framed, square print of a greeting card with an uncharacteristically inspirational quote on the front; I bought two of them from a quirky New Hampshire boutique & gave the other to my friend Will before he moved from Boston to South Korea.
The zebra-print rug in the far corner of the room isn’t quite my style, but it was the biggest rug available at Big Lots the day I went in search of one. I’d spent the afternoon tormenting my cat, stomping in his general direction just to watch him jump, when I heard a stern knock on the door. I opened it to find a thin-lipped, middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Barbara, my downstairs neighbor: “It’s very loud,” she complained, reminding my then-boyfriend Nathan and me that our lease required us to cover two-thirds of our wood floors in rugs or carpet. We’d lived there less than a month, and Nathan, unfazed, told me we didn’t have to hurry, but I nonetheless insisted we spend that evening buying as many rugs as possible. This is the only one that made the trip with me when I broke up with him and moved out of our apartment a year and a half later.
My bed is new, from the frame to the mattress, purchased in haste to replace a rickety, creaky, hand-me-down twin bed I was thrilled to send to the dump. I didn’t know anything about buying a bed, not really, and I didn’t think I could afford one at all, but over drinks at a house party one night, my friend Allison’s boyfriend convinced me of the merits of Overstock.com. That night, tipsy on booze and enthusiasm, I researched the highest-reviewed mattress and frame on the site and shelled out a mere $300 for my own new queen. Convinced I didn’t posses the engineering skills necessary to assemble the frame on my own, it took me two months to open the box it arrived in. When I finally did, I discovered that the collapsible frame had come pre-assembled. At that point, I’d been sleeping on a mattress on the floor for nearly 60 days.
None of the rest of my furniture is new, nor is it nearly as luxurious as a queen-sized bed. My couch is too small — a loveseat, really, but there’s not enough room in this place for anything bigger. I frequently lament the fact that I can’t drift off to sleep on it mid-Netflix binge, that I can’t offer it up to traveling loved ones who need a place to stay on the weekend, but it came free from my friend Emily, who was redecorating her own place, and it fits perfectly into its little corner. My friend Aaron offered up his SUV to help me transport it, and when we couldn’t get it to fit in his trunk, we trekked to CVS in the freezing cold & bought bungee cords to strap it in. On a frigid February night, we drove home with the back door open and the flashers on and our fingers crossed for good luck.
My work desk is a monstrous, imposing piece thing, made of solid oak & heavier than a thousand sins. I don’t ever sit at it, not really, but it’s the only piece of furniture I own that feels like it belongs with me, the kind I’ll someday will to my children, who probably won’t want it. It used to sit in my grandparents’ library, covered in bills & letters & newspaper clipping, adorned with photos of family & cards from holidays long past. When I was a kid, I’d slide open the long, thin top drawer & search for treasures — a roll of American flag stamps, a pretty ballpoint pen, a to-do list written in my grandmother’s familiar, blocky scrawl. I inherited it when she died, and I bear considerable guilt about the water rings that now mar its surface, visible evidence of too many Diet Cokes and canned beers.
The only other real piece of furniture I brought with me is a dark, cherry wood vanity with an adjustable mirror and a matching, padded stool. I’ve never been the kind of girl high-maintenance enough for a vanity — I’ve always applied my makeup while sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a full-length mirror — but it was a three-year anniversary gift from Nathan, just before everything went south for good. One July afternoon, he sent me a text and asked that I not come home for a couple more hours, presumably so he could assemble it. When I finally returned home, he led me to our guest bedroom and whisked a sheet off of my gift, shining and fancy and new and, it turned out, never to be used for anything other than storage. I loved it, though, and nearly a year after our breakup, I still couldn’t bring myself to take the photostrip of us out of its perch in the corner of the mirror.
My bookshelf was a gift, too, although a slightly less ceremonious one. Set snugly in the corner behind the door, it is squat and square and made of the kind of slick, not-fooling-anybody particleboard that screams, “I can’t quite afford real furniture.” Actually, I couldn’t quite afford fake furniture either, so I’d added the bookshelf to my “To Buy for My Apartment Someday” wishlist on Amazon in the hopes that I’d be able to purchase it sometime in the future. It arrived at my front door one day, a surprise gift from my mom, and I had to borrow a screwdriver from my neighbor to put it together. I bailed on plans with friends one Saturday night & instead spent the evening watching Grey’s Anatomy reruns and assembling my new bookshelf with gusto and pride. I put one of the shelves on backward, which doesn’t affect its function but is noticeable if you’re looking too closely at my collection of Dawson’s Creek DVDs or Harry Potter books.
Some days, I wish I could forget these stories, these fragmented memories of how each of the elements of my everyday life came into being. On my sadder days, I sit on my couch in the corner, looking out over my space, and I think of all the different ways I got here — the places I’ve been and the versions of myself who has lived in all of them, lamenting a life spent on the go. In more optimistic moments, I think fondly of the past and wonder what will come next — which stories will make it along to the next spot, wherever that may be. Mostly, I wonder when I’ll see fit to stop telling stories. And then I wonder if I ever could.
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Photo by Flickr user @hadzinski / CC
