The Old Recliner - M.A. Brotherton

I’ve talked about the fire I had a few years back. I lost a lot of personal possessions in that fire, and I miss many of them. The one thing that I find myself missing more than any of the rest of it, though, is the comfortable, well worn, recliner. I’m not sure if it is the fact that I no longer have a recliner, because honestly, my couch is pretty comfortable and I can stretch out on it pretty easily, but it’s not the same.

That recliner was the first piece of furniture I ever bought. It was definitely the first piece of furniture I bought that didn’t require an allen wrench to put it together. At this point in my adulthood, I still lack furniture that doesn’t get put together with an idiot key. At the time that I bought that chair, I didn’t have any other furniture in my living room. Actually, I didn’t have any furniture but a desk for my computer, a TV sitting on a plastic tote, and a mattress that was sitting directly on the floor.

That’s right, I was living a fairly hermetic lifestyle. My friends would bring over camp chairs on the rare occasional that they came to my apartment just to keep from sitting on the floor. That chair represented my first step towards actually building something out of myself.

It’s been a little over 3 years since the fire, and I have had plenty of opportunity to replace that chair with a new and shiny recliner, but I can’t bring myself to do it.

Some things are just part of who you are, stepping stones on the path of life.

I loved that chair, but now it’s part of a past that I’m leaving behind.

In many ways, that chair represented my first steps towards adulthood, but it also represented something else. It was the safe, comfortable place that I was able to hide away from the world. It was my comfort zone.

It’s strange what things can mean when you really start to think about them. Objects, that really shouldn’t have any value hold so much sway over us.

So, Good Bye, Comfy Recliner. You represent a time in my life when I was pretty lost and confused. You were a safe place in a pretty tragic storm. Good Bye, comfy friend. You are missed, and irreplaceable.