I Bought a Sectional with a Chaise and I Still Feel Guilty About the Nap

The green sectional was the first thing I ever bought purely because I wanted it. That sentence should not feel like a confession. It is the truest sentence I have. I have bought a lot of furniture in my life, and none of it was for me.

The couch before this one was chosen for durability and stain resistance, for how it would look to people, for what everyone else would need from it. The sectional is different. It has a chaise. I bought it for knitting, for putting my feet up, for a splendid little nap. I said the words out loud to the saleswoman and then apologized for saying them out loud, and she looked at me the way you look at a person who has just admitted something enormous.

It is green. Deep, soft, ridiculous green. I do not care if it is childish. It is mine.

On Saturday afternoons I knit on the chaise. My hands know the rhythm. Knit, purl, knit. The television plays something I am not really watching. And sometimes, without permission, the rhythm gets slower, and my eyes get heavy, and I tip sideways into a nap.

I do not go gently into the nap. I go the way a person falls who is not sure the ground will catch them.

The waking is the story. I wake with a start, and the first thought is not where am I. The first thought is what should I be doing. There is a list in my head, and it has been there since I was seven, and it does not care that I am forty-one and the people on the list are grown and the house I am responsible for is only mine. The list says laundry. The list says groceries. The list says call your mother. The list says you have no right to this.

I sit up. I look at the knitting in my lap. I hear the television. The whole room is soft and green and mine, and the guilt is standing in the doorway like a guest who has never once knocked.

Here is the part I am still learning. The guilt is a visitor, not the owner. The house is mine. The sectional is mine. The nap was mine, even the part I resisted, even the part that came with the cost of waking ashamed.

I want to be honest. Some Saturdays I fold the knitting, stand up, and go do the list, because the guilt is loud and the habit is older than I am. Some Saturdays the chaise keeps me.

But the green sectional is still there. Every Saturday. It does not move and it does not lecture. It waits, green and soft and bought with my own money because I wanted it, and that wanting is the whole point. One day I will wake from the nap and the first thought will be where am I, and I will know. The green sectional will be where I am. The chaise will be under my feet. The knitting will be in my lap. The splendid little nap will have happened again.

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