Leaving an old life behind...

 I remember a time when people used to come to this house just to see me, to take a look, even without a real invitation, and that’s when I’d change a moment of their lives – not dramatically, and not permanently, but changing some of their tired stands to the more welcomely accepted and appreciated sit downs, and always just enough to see a smile arise, or at least to feel one coming. I wasn’t paid for this, but I was certainly bought for it.

 Some of the other things told me to stop trying to force my own place into there, and to stop trying to change someone’s breathing for a moment, adding a little cosiness, or planting a moment of comfort – one that they had probably been saving for their own houses later. Those things said that maybe the people in this house only bought me to do that, but they also told me that they’d soon want to change things again, even if they just moved me into the corner over where they were, or perhaps into another room where some of their friends had gone. Even that would be considered a big change for these people...a change that they would be looking for at a ‘soon time’ as they called it.

 I personally think that I was bought to try to fit in with everything else here, and so I tried to keep my space where people would be happy with me, but like most things trying to find their own reasons for being here, in the end I was replaced before my thinking reached even a first line of a conclusion. It was my job to help people to feel peaceful for a minute or two, and to help them to leave bits of their lives behind, even if that meant just bits of a day, but I never thought that my efforts in helping them to change their lives would ever mean that I’d also be so drastically changing mine…

 Friends of the house-owners used to comment upon my shade, some even referring to it as a ‘neutral palette’, my design and my shape, and others just seemed happy to see my colour in the place where I sat. They used to say that I helped to lighten the space where the sun reached in, and that I facilitated in showing off some of the other things that sat there, too. Perhaps I was the non-moving host of that sitting room, momentarily filling the room with my presence in just one part of it, and helping to introduce the other things without any movement or voice? Or maybe I was just too big to go anywhere else? I liked to be a part of that change in things, even if it just meant changing the vocabulary the people used – That word ‘facilitate’ was always in my top-ten of favourites.

 I remember my entrance here, when I was initially called ‘ the armchair’, and then, as my time was caught growing up, I evolved, or devolved, into just ‘chair’. They said that I was a part of a three-piece collection, alongside another chair just like me – a brother. He was always sitting on the other side of the room, and then there was our father, very similar in style but much longer in shape, that kept me away from my sibling. When I was talked about as just one part of what they referred to as a ‘suite’, they said that I matched the other things around, using that ‘match’ word as a reason for me, and I suppose, the three of us being here. I did, however, also hear that some of the other things were brought here because they ‘matched’ with me, so it I don’t really know if I started this matching, or if I was brought here to keep the matching going. In fact, they once said that I had been chosen because of the colour of the floor – a floor that was soft and friendly for me, but that had another very hard one underneath, that I imagine must have been pretty cold had it been alone. When the house owners, an elderly man and lady, were once on their own, they had said that I had helped the whole room to feel like a comfortable part of our house, but they didn’t call it a house in that moment; they used the word ‘home’. I think they used that word only for our place though, because I heard them talking about other places where people lived as ‘houses’, but only ours as a ‘home’. Some of their shared vocabulary I have gradually picked up, but other words I still don’t know today, and my memory is not very good in these days, so I apologise for not using all of them.

 They patted me and brushed me down with their hands, sometimes quite affectionately, in the beginning, bringing their smiles over when they came to sit both by and on me. There was a big stuffed and puffed-up square on me, another on my brother, and three more of them between us, on our father – all called cushions, I believe. Sometimes they would get moved around and I didn’t always get the same one every day, so I became quite friendly with them all, which was nice.

 Our great, shared morning sun, seen through the big window here, was like a great beckoning for them. They came admiring it and to sit in its brightness with me at those times when it was expectant and warm, but they never really stayed too long – just to chat a little about the day ahead, or about the day behind, but they never stayed as long as I stayed in it. Then later, when the sun had moved to shine on my brother, then over to the garden, and then I suspect to another house, they would come back and pull attractive sheets over that very same window. This was their acknowledgement that the sun had left us, and would only come back after that day ahead that they had been chatting about, had become the day behind that they now didn’t want to chat anymore about. Then at that darker time, several of those people, sometimes all of them, would come back to me, press a button on a small plastic, rectangular box that housed lots of buttons, and we’d all watch a big clear screen come to life. It had lights and faces and voices and music and the people would sit with me again, sometimes even lie down upon me and keep me just as warm as I kept them. That screen made changes in them – screams, and jumps, cheers, and even brought silence and crying – things that I wished that I could have made, but alas, all of its changes were just like mine, always to be brief.

 There were things to eat put beside me, too – things that people always seemed to eat very quickly, and drinks of so many different colours, alerting bubbles to make a fizzing noise, especially when poured into glasses from the bottles they were brought here in. The fizzes were always the same though, it didn’t matter what colour the liquid was. I came to the conclusion that it must have been a bottled-up secret that the drinks kept away from the drinkers – something that attracted them, even though they didn’t really know what it really was. Voices screamed out like savages if any of those glasses were ever rested though. Sometimes those tastes would be taken straight from the bottles, and then voices shouted even louder for ‘tops to be put back on’. There were also frequent times when both those bottles and glasses, and additional plates were rested on me, and they would shake a little, sometimes bounce, and move and turn over, or even fall and I would get a little wet in places, but it was then that I had my own little taste and discovered just why all of those flavours made those children so happy – so many different essences in so many of those bubbles, like the excitement was in the drink itself and not only in the person drinking it. I once had two plates on me for all of the time that the sun wasn’t here – that was when those voices were the loudest that I ever remember hearing them.

 In those days, lots of people would come to our home. They would sit behind me, around a big table that was darker than me, but I don’t think it was quite as comfortable, because after the clock had moved on a little and the sun had drifted to another window, the visitors would edge my way. They’d always make a ‘Hummph’ sort of noise as they let gravity do its job and pull them down here to let me do my job. I got to hear a lot of stories when this happened and there was usually a smell of a drink called coffee when these were told, although I never got to taste that one.

 Those stories were about problems with people who were never here at the time, or about money that they never had – always about changing someone or something that wasn’t present. Maybe those absent that they wanted to change were in other shops at the time, looking at chairs like me and trying to imagine what they might look like if they took them to their own houses, maybe to do what these people were doing here – trying to find comfort in other people who might listen to the changes they wanted. I think I helped a little because I don’t imagine some of the big transformations that they talked on and on about were things that they would have liked to have revealed had they been bustling through the entrance to a busy supermarket, or sitting in a tree. I suppose some of them were even coming here, just because I was here, like I was a sort a source of confidence, or at least a provider of a calm seat, while they went through their uncomfortable exchanges from a late-morning chat to a well-into-the-afternoon open-invite assembly. The man who lived here said that I was no longer a part of a suite now, and that I’d become the ‘friendship’ seat in the clinic. He even said that I looked like I was always waiting for the next patient. It was strange, but they never used my brother for this, and I still don’t know why…

 I think that I was even willing people here at times, to come over so that I could help them to leave things behind, or at least give them an idea about whatever was the subject of their own clinic for the day. Unbeknown to me, and more-or-less at the same time, the people in this home were gradually edging onto the idea of a clinic for me. It didn’t involve talking to me, but it was like one of their private ones in which they’d talk about people who were not here at the time, but unfortunately, this absentee was here. When this began to happen, I could still smell the coffee, and when it became a little more serious and money was mentioned, I could also smell yet another drink called ‘tea’. The excited, little children had now become serious, bigger children, maybe not even children anymore, and the fizz and the bubbles that they had once daringly-brought over to me were now as rare as the comments about where I came from.

 I was brought here with lots of wishes and some of the visitors even said that they had wished that they had seen me first, so that they could have bought me. Those were kind words, but to be honest, after hundreds and hundreds of times of the sun warming me and then going off to its other places, I became something else, and no longer the breather for people. I even heard the older people telling the younger people to get off me and to go and do something, because the change that I was making in them was not a good change.

 I found papers and pens on me at times, and when the sun was not here at all, that box that they used to turn that glass screen on would stay on me until the sun came back, sometimes until it went down again as well. I heard people shouting about it, asking where it had been put and why it hadn’t been put somewhere else. I never found out if it had a marked place in this room, so as not to get lost, but its place certainly wasn’t down the side of me, and nor behind any of those friendly cushions, some of which had already started with their changes, slipping off to the bedrooms where those now older, young people were watching glass screens of their own. I had keys put on me, bags heavy with school books, food papers and boxes, and even food out of papers now. Everything had changed, and it seemed like a real chore for some of these people to actually rest on me at times, as if the idea of my being in this place was now the very reason fewer people came in here.

 Once, people even put a book on me that was full of pictures of examples of other chairs like me, as parts of other suites like mine, and at the back of the book there were big squares called ‘samples’, but they were material and not paper, and some were taken out and spread across our floor. It was during those days that I started to see some of the paper being scraped off the walls and squares of the same colour as those samples being stuck onto the walls – not all over, but just in one corner. It was only after chatting to the sun one very early morning that I discovered that that new colour square was going to be part of that ‘matching’ activity that they once indulged in with me – the one where the window covers, the floor and me were all going to be alike, or at least would ‘sit-well’ together. I thought we still were like that, but it seemed that somebody had decided we weren’t matching enough anymore.

 Those books with the chair and full suite pictures started to increase, and it was strange that when new ones arrived, they would be almost dropped onto me, and the owners here would drop down with them, as if their legs had stopped because the books were heavy. There were more and more samples coming out, and even two men came with their own books one day and brought long strips of metal, which they used to mark things on the floor, and to line things up across the walls. They always had that coffee drink, and so I didn’t think that they were too serious about their work because I hadn’t seen any tea at that time. However, another man came very early one day and he brought his own drink in something different – like a really long metal cup, but he never mentioned what was in that, so that could have been the serious tea that started all this. Well, it must have been, because he came back with two friends, and that was when the other things here gave me that ‘Told you so’ nod, right at the end of the month…

 The men took us to a house that belonged to some friends of the people whom had sat on me once before. It took us quite a long time to get to their house and there was quite a lot of shouting when we finally got there, but it wasn’t very nice shouting like before. A lady was very angry about some revisions, and I saw those metal-line things out again – the ones that they had used before to check the walls and floors. The men were also shouting at each other about spaces and corners, and it was all going round and round, but at least they didn’t shout at me. It all resulted in me being put back in to the truck alone and…well, I don’t remember much more, other than being taken out of that same truck very, very quietly – almost silently, and the truck itself then speeding off faster than any truck I had ever seen on that glass screen that everyone liked to watch in my last home, but that seems years ago…

 I haven’t seen my dad or my brother for a long time now, but the sun still comes around in just the same way as I’ve always known, even though everything beside me now is very different. It’s colder out here and I don’t just get occasional spills on me, but sometimes water pours on me for hours. When this happens, I don’t need any patting down anymore, but I now appreciate those people, with their beckoning for the sun to show itself quickly. Here it is very quiet, and it is lonely and very distant from everything, and I was right about that floor being cold underneath. ‘Ah yes, that reminds me – the name that they gave to that little box that they frequently misplaced down my sides; the one that they used for turning on that bright and busy screen that took way all of their talking time together…, yes, that’s it – ‘remote’.