Place Is-

Place is a noun but can be used a subject. Place is lost which has been the subject of this blog. Place is also my bipolar.

Place is in my parent’s bedroom. This is when it began. I said I wouldn’t go back but sometimes you have to go back to places you don’t want to. I am crying. I am twelve, fourteen, sixteen. It is dark in their room. My mom rolls over in bed. “Elizabeth it is two in the morning.” I am anxious about school and what I did over the weekend with Kevin at the party and how everyone at school will be talking about me behind me on Monday. Place is in the house where I grew up on Volze Street.

Place is in the psychiatrist’s office who tells me I have bipolar. I am twenty four. It was nice to have a name and definition. I like definitions, to have something to reference when I am trying to explain who I am. I forget sometimes that I have bipolar. I’m not bipolar.

Place is where I am. Place at this moment is in our apartment. I am on the couch I have had for twenty-six years. I found it in a thrift store for four hundred dollars in 1995 down Bittersweet.

It dates back to the fifties and is beautiful. A spring is coming up but I don’t mind sitting on it. The fabric is frayed and faded having once been lime green, and underneath the fabric hangs like a pudgy stomach.the stuffing is coming out. An ornate wooden frame curves and stretches out like arms. One leg is a centimeter off the ground but it doesn’t wobble.

It takes up the largest amount of space no matter what room it is in. It is the focal piece and my favorite piece. When I see it I feel at home.

There is a cigarette burn underneath the cushions from when I used to smoke. I rub my finger in the hole as one rubs the pain from someone they love.

The couch has lived in six apartments, traveled cross country and has spent an unreasonable amount of time in a storage facility. It has been loving and patient. It should have a name but I just call it “Couch” or “it” which in no way is a reflection of my feelings. I have loved Couch. It has been my longest relationship.

Couch has been with me during sickness and in health and it longs now for me to come back to it again. I feel it sigh when I sit on its cushions, it wraps its wooden frame around me when I lean back in the corner.

I have written many stories on Couch, mostly fiction, until now. This is not fiction and Couch knows that, too. It breathes heavy with me. I usually sit on the middle cushion, right where that spring has risen. I have a pen and notepad on my lap, a Diet Coke on the table in front of me. I have always liked to write by hand until I entered graduate school and my stories became longer, like this one. Couch has as many stories as I do; its memories hold my own but they are ground in deep in its fibers and stubborn to get out.

It was right here I kissed Jason who moved away and Mike who broke my heart.

My friend Scott who waited tables with me at a Thai Restaurant, came back from Mexico and stayed one night on Couch. We filled the ashtray with Marlboros and he left empty beer cans, Miller I think, on the table. We didn’t talk much about anything important. It was summer and the first time I lived by myself. That was the last time I we saw him. He killed himself a week later. Couch and I cried together, we didn’t know.

I had met a guy whose name begins with the first letter of the alphabet at the coffee shop down the street and I visited him everyday. I had a crush on him even though I had a boyfriend. He went by the name “Spicey Brown” as if he were a rapper. We talked about auditions and who would play who in our play as we smoked joints on the edge of the seat.

I had my first manic attack on Couch. We planned my trip to the Grand Canyon by myself. I argued with my mother over the phone about taking my father along. who wanted my father to travel with me so I wouldn’t go alone. She was afraid I would fall off the edge in my “energetic “ state. In this state, while hiking down the nine miles into the canyon, I told my dad I wanted to become a forest ranger. He tells me, “I don’t remember that.” When I tell my mom he doesn’t remember I feel upset. “How can he not remember? That’s all I thought about the whole trip.” I felt slighted as if everyone should be so lucky to have had a manic attack. For my father it was “the greatest trip.” “Sometimes people remember only what they want to,” my mom said. When we returned I became depressed. This we all remember, including Couch. It hides this memory really deep, as if a further depth existed beneath it’s cushions. The memory buries itself in the wood.

I had a boyfriend whose name begins with the second letter of the alphabet. We stayed together for two and a half years, during after and into treatment. He was rough around the edges and sometimes made Couch uncomfortable. We fought hard- curses and emotional words,

The day I was fired unfairly B sat in the corner on Couch in the flannel shirt I often wore. It may have been winter. His hands were held between his knees. I came out of the bathroom and told him I had swallowed all my medication and to call my mom, “Tell her I don’t think I want to die.” That was the first time Couch went into storage, for two and half years. It waited patiently for me to get better until we could be together again.

When it came out of storage it had a few frays . Its fibers expanded like the sponge animals you add water to and watch them take shape.

Couch traveled cross country to California alone in a moving truck and back again. We came home to Chicago and it had to go back into storage, but I told it, “Don’t worry. It won’t be as long.”wouldn’t be as long this time.”

I’m not sure it believed me but it didn’t have a choice. I ran my hand over its cushions and it’s frame shrugged at my touch.

When we moved into our apartment it looked bigger than before and when the sun came in through the windows it glowed.

I began my novel in that apartment with Couch. My now husband and I planned our marriage.

My cat Katie of seventeen years breathed heavy on Couch as she was waited for me to let her go. I sat by her as she lay between the two cushions.

I don’t know when the spring came up and the cushions tore but they did. It’s tired, I know. It has been scared with this depressive episode and me going missing. I’m my saddened faraway state it likes to remind me of better times. A piece of fabric puffs out and on it reads, “You wrote your grad school application here. We read your acceptance letter here, too. You fell asleep over there.” When I try to remember it’s frame twinkles in the place. I remember it’s the same place I sit with my husband while he runs his fingers in my hair.

We will be getting a new couch and when my husband and I discuss it I make sure we are far away in the kitchen and we must talk soft. These are the moments I wish we spoke sign language.

I have already picked it out- an olive green velvet. It will be part of a new beginning. When I find me it will be with the new couch. I will have to apologize daily to Couch because it has been waiting a long time for me to be found and it won’t be here for that.

My husband asked me what I want to do with Couch. I can’t just put it in the alley for someone else to take, it won’t like it, it will be scared, or even worse, no one takes it all. We will put it into storage. I know it will be lonely and fear I’m not coming back. I speak into it’s darkest corner, where it’s trying hard to not listen. “I’m coming back.. You will be in our bed and breakfast in a large front room, recovered in bright hues.” Couch relaxes and some color comes back.

There are new injuries. Our cat Lucy has scratched insensitively at its side. We have eaten and left a small stain. I tell Couch I am sorry. “Pf” comes comes out like a spit as I shift my body and the wood lets off steam. I think maybe Couch is mad. I push my mouth into the hole where the cushion is seeping, I tell it, “Place is with you. With you I’m not lost.”

My mom keeps asking “When are we going to get the couch?” I push it off. I’m not ready yet.

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