The Couch: A Final Version
Metadata
Highlights
- But those rules are also the strategies by which people manage to build lives here, carving out love and home and comfort in a place that does not seem suited for any of them. One of those rules is that an apartment, or even just a room in one, is a house if you insist that it is.
- Note: you’re forced to carve out space for your own home
- Money, and debt, and savings, and security, in all its many forms, are languages that we often don’t even know we can’t speak until we hear other people talking and can’t understand them. Couches were part of that language, just like savings and vacations and homes and even having children; something lost in translation, something that said maybe everyone else knows something you don’t.
- I had barely any other furniture in that apartment, but I had a couch and it was a universe, an island on which I could safely float away.
- There’s no real agenda and no plan: Wanna come over and sit on the couch and look at our phones and talk shit? The couch is at once a social orbit— especially in these small city spaces, where an entire house party sometimes takes place on a single couch— and a place where the obligation to perform for a social audience evaporates.
- We eat on the couch and we nap on the couch and we put our butts on the couch. A couch is a lot of things but maybe above all it is a record of butts. The substance and meaning of a couch is butts. We put our bare feet on it; we drool on the pillows when we fall asleep, we spill coffee and clean it up but after a certain point when you’ve spilled enough coffee, cleaning it up is mostly notional.
- Love is a kind of habitation, a familiarizing, sinking fingers into the skin of something, knowing and being known. The things we love are always disgusting because they have to hold and encompass our bodies in all our bodies’ impoliteness, leaking fluids, making mistakes, shedding dust and leaving traces. Everything that matters gets used up, gets dented and bruised, gets smudged with fingerprints. It might be possible to say that love is the process of wearing out the novelty of things.
- The couch is made of memory foam, and my husband and I tell a lot of bad jokes about how it remembers too much. Memory is another difference between a house and a hotel, and memory is also what we mean when we call our apartments our houses: This is the place that remembers
- The couch knows me too well; the couch is a mirror. I’m in this picture and I don’t like it. Live with anything too long, and it becomes a reflection. Memory means keeping records; an unavoidable portrait of myself forms through the patterns I have worn into the places I have been.
title: “The Couch: A Final Version”
author: “griefbacon.substack.com”
url: ”https://griefbacon.substack.com/p/the-couch-a-final-version”
date: 2023-12-19
source: hypothesis
tags: media/articles
The Couch: A Final Version
Metadata
Highlights
- But those rules are also the strategies by which people manage to build lives here, carving out love and home and comfort in a place that does not seem suited for any of them. One of those rules is that an apartment, or even just a room in one, is a house if you insist that it is.
- Note: you’re forced to carve out space for your own home
- Money, and debt, and savings, and security, in all its many forms, are languages that we often don’t even know we can’t speak until we hear other people talking and can’t understand them. Couches were part of that language, just like savings and vacations and homes and even having children; something lost in translation, something that said maybe everyone else knows something you don’t.
- I had barely any other furniture in that apartment, but I had a couch and it was a universe, an island on which I could safely float away.
- There’s no real agenda and no plan: Wanna come over and sit on the couch and look at our phones and talk shit? The couch is at once a social orbit— especially in these small city spaces, where an entire house party sometimes takes place on a single couch— and a place where the obligation to perform for a social audience evaporates.
- We eat on the couch and we nap on the couch and we put our butts on the couch. A couch is a lot of things but maybe above all it is a record of butts. The substance and meaning of a couch is butts. We put our bare feet on it; we drool on the pillows when we fall asleep, we spill coffee and clean it up but after a certain point when you’ve spilled enough coffee, cleaning it up is mostly notional.
- Love is a kind of habitation, a familiarizing, sinking fingers into the skin of something, knowing and being known. The things we love are always disgusting because they have to hold and encompass our bodies in all our bodies’ impoliteness, leaking fluids, making mistakes, shedding dust and leaving traces. Everything that matters gets used up, gets dented and bruised, gets smudged with fingerprints. It might be possible to say that love is the process of wearing out the novelty of things.
- The couch is made of memory foam, and my husband and I tell a lot of bad jokes about how it remembers too much. Memory is another difference between a house and a hotel, and memory is also what we mean when we call our apartments our houses: This is the place that remembers
- The couch knows me too well; the couch is a mirror. I’m in this picture and I don’t like it. Live with anything too long, and it becomes a reflection. Memory means keeping records; an unavoidable portrait of myself forms through the patterns I have worn into the places I have been.