sofa raze the one we've got was made to match the chair i have upstairs. i'm sure of it. they've spent their lives a floor apart. the chair is almost a decade older, but it's held up well. the couch is a different story. only the middle cushion retains any kind of appreciable muscle. the soft cubes we've spent the last seven years sitting on are so far gone, you can feel the springs beneath their skin. we went back to the place the couch came from to see if we could find a worthwhile replacement. it was pissing rain. we took turns holding two heavy doors open for a kid with curly hair. he thanked us. he looked surprised by the sound of his own voice. a salesman stood outside the entrance to the clearance room, wide-eyed and gulping to get more air. he tried to explain to a family of four that the sectional they wanted wasn't the colour they thought it was. "yeah," he said. "they mixed the earth tones and taupe. so it isn't *grey* grey." nothing can be simple anymore. everything has to have some ridiculous distinction that doesn't mean anything to anyone with a pulse. i thought we might get lucky and meet a distant cousin to what we already had. a man with a name he couldn't even pronounce himself offered us help we didn't want. everything i sat on felt the same. soft back. hard bottom. is this what people find comfortable now? or have they been guests in their own lives for so long that they don't feel anything at all, so it doesn't matter? we tried the main floor. it didn't make a difference. there was nothing worth falling in love with. broken down and dying, our couch still outstripped every overpriced thing in the store. the sky had calmed down a little by the time we were leaving. a middle-aged man was out front holding a lit cigarette between his index and middle fingers, talking to someone who wasn't there. that'll be me someday soon. bank on it. 230417 what's it to you? who go blather from