Man Vs. Chair
The people outside are doing what they can to move back and forth between work and the bar and home. I skip those steps and just stay in this one, back-knotting position here on this old recliner which has been a part of my life longer than most of my friends, longer than my son and wife have. It’s showing signs of long nights holding hands, the arms’ leather cracked and showing raw tan through the dyed gray exterior its worn all of this time and the mechanisms are creaky but stable, similar to my own aging insides. I can’t help but wonder what else we have in common, in the grand scheme of life, God and the universe, is there all that much difference between this recliner — which I’ve been contemplating selling soon as we’re leaving town and it’s a large and clunky thing to haul — and myself, or any other human?
Most of us would like to think of ourselves as grander, more clandestine in nature even, than a mere piece of furniture, but in the end the likelihood of this already beat up La-Z-Boy still propping someone, somewhere’s feet up as they watch Friends on Nick at Night even as my friends and family celebrate my funeral is pretty high. Things can last a good deal longer than humans, maybe that’s why we’re always trying to get new ones and discard the old, so we never have to realize how fragile we are compared to most of what we create.
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