life as understood

I sit down and write now, as I usually do nowadays, from our real-life living room couch. It's a soft couch with an ugly white and beige get-up, and some faint light blue and pink vertical stripeage, reminiscent of a design one might find in an Arizona retirement community in the early '90s. Nothing like the gorgeous entity at the top of the page. Over that, however, is draped a much more pleasant pastel-green knit cover, which we bought. There's also a tear on the left arm, under the cover, just behind the front support, which I caused with my foot at the beginning of the couch's ownership. I like this couch a great deal, despite its brevity, though I realize I likely haven't openly acknowledged or appreciated its long months of service to my family. Now, before you immediately write this off as just another run-of-the-mill drunken furniture-appreciation rant, allow me to note that I'm quite sober and of sound mind, or so I've come to believe.

My sudden need to appease the couch comes as a desperate attempt to cover all my bases as I find myself knee-deep in a shenanigan the likes of which I've never seen. I suspect magic. But let me back up a bit.

This afternoon, I've been doing laundry, which involves countless trips back and forth across the parking lot between our apartment and the house where the coin-op machines sit in the musky basement. On my third trip down there, after depositing the darks into the great spinning beast, I saw something in the room that caused me to stagger back and lose my breath. It was our couch, the very couch I had just left quietly in the living room. It was on its back on the concrete floor, the green knit cover falling seductively off the top to reveal its true upholstery: beige and white with Arizona stripes. I sat back on a nearby table to consider what I was seeing. Could it be that someone had moved it here from my apartment when I wasn't looking? Impossible. I had just come from there, and there was no one else in sight. Still, I couldn't fight the feeling that somehow, I had been punk'd.

My buddy Matt who lives in my building has a long history of such tomfoolery, but he never turns it on his friends, save the one time when he rang the doorbell at 3:00am and blasted Brandon in the face with the airhorn. (Yes, we knew that was you.) Even if it was Matt, though, he couldn't carry the couch alone, and not without my noticing. I reached under the green knit cover and felt the left arm of the impostor couch, just behind the support. There was the rip. This was too much. I sat back down on the table, aghast.

After staring for a moment, I ambled back to the apartment, cursing myself for leaving the door unlocked. Even though I was just leaving home for a minute to go deposit the darks, I honestly thought "I hope no one takes my stuff." Boom. But alas, I walked in the door, and there was my couch sitting right where it should, right where it is now, as though it hadn't moved an inch. It was now that I began to consider the supernatural.

As any self-respecting college student would do, I ran back to the laundry room to document my first magical encounter on my cameraphone. The camera, however--of course--didn't work. Like a vampire, the mystical object wouldn't be captured.

Sarah wasn't impressed by my recounting of this story. Perhaps it's because, as part of our mutual agreement, she's currently reading such classic realist fiction as The Great Gatsby while I finish up the Harry Potter series. As a result, she's far more rational lately, whereas my first inclination is to blame some sort of transfiguration.

No, magic doesn't seem likely, and the more plausible explanation of divine intervention doesn't exactly sit right with me either, at least not in this instance. For what purpose God (or Voldemort) would clone my couch, I know not. I may, in fact, have to resign myself to the probable truth that there just so happens to be a new couch in the laundry room, exactly like ours, with the same cover from Walmart, and with the same rip in the same place. I could believe that, but that's no fun.