Space + Time Continuum

That thing when you’ve lived in a place for almost a decade and your living room furniture has been arranged in every possible configuration. You already know the current one works best for the space but after three years you want more open space for workouts at home.

So you crank up Pandora and move shit around, thinking you’ll execute a brilliant new room. Instead, you just create a cluttered version of the same furniture. (Yeah, you could move everything back, but where’s the fun in that?)

Cut to you defaulting to the arrangement that was your living room from 2006 to 2010. Telling yourself that it’s not the same because those armchairs have been recovered and the flooring is different and throw pillows are now slip covered in stripey fabric. 

But as soon as you step back to survey the scene, it’s not different. Your coffee table is now exactly where you and your late husband shared hundreds of meals. Your sofa has returned to the place where you both sat, casually discussing the ER, unaware that his life actually depended on it. Oh and there’s the newly open space by the east wall where the medics pronounced him and left his body for the medical examiner to pick up.

You signed up for a fresh room arrangement, not a post-traumatic experience so you try to  negotiate with your grief: am I capable of overcoming these associations? Of replacing them with a calmer, striped-and-upholstered version? You’re not sure about your capability, but you are sure that another hour of heavy lifting only to return the room to where it was before feels like a colossal waste of a night.

You decide to decide tomorrow. You press pause on Pandora, head into your office-slash-kitchen to transcribe a client’s podcast and leave your phone to charge in the bedroom.

Ten minutes later, music from your wireless speaker floods your apartment, drowning out the podcast on your desktop. You did not press play on the phone in your bedroom; you are in the office-slash-kitchen. And the song that’s inexplicably playing? It’s called “Breathe.”

You step tentatively into your living room, which is empty of visible ghosts. Ditto the bedroom. You pause the Pandora again but hover for a moment, trying to catch it auto-playing. You return to the office and your podcast project, secretly hoping that the song will play again.

It doesn’t, but the incident shifts your perspective on the living room arrangement. Instead of a painful reminder of your previous life, it feels like a portal of potential: an entry point via furniture into the space and time continuum.