The Couches

One fine day, I reported for an ultrasound.

The baby was not cooperating, and I should go walk around a bit.

"Something's wrong," my child's father asserted.

"You're paranoid."

But actually, he wasn't. A few moments later the tech told me to wait for the doctor and a few moments after that, a doctor who ruined my fucking life brought my world down with three words: "Incompatible with life." In two weeks we would see a specialist, who may or may not confirm the diagnosis.

So I did what anyone would do.

I shopped for couches.

"We're having a baby. We need something to bring a baby to."

With all the moronic faith in the world I turned over the pittance of a tax return, our first as a married couple (and as it turns out, one of only two we would file together), to buy a sofa and a loveseat. 

How stupid of me, to believe. 

It didn't fix anything. Not long after, a specialist confirmed the words of that bitch ass whore slut idiot doctor. My baby had anencephaly. He would die.

I had options, but there was no choice for me. I did the only right thing, and I carried my baby, and I had my baby and 2 days after his birth, Gabriel and I were discharged from the hospital and sent home.  We laid on those couches and lived and cuddled and loved and fought and snuggled and after eight days on those couches, he died. In my arms. On the couch.

I waited long hours on those couches for Gabriel's father to come home, drunk. I crawled from the depths of my despair, some days dragging myself from my bed only to get so far as those couches.  When I was divorced and needed a roommate to help with the rent, I relinquished the couches to a stranger as a part of communal living space.

One day, sitting on the sofa writing thank you notes my baby shower, I became quite aware my unborn child would be born that day, and Eden came barreling into the world hours later.

Those couches were picked up and moved to our new home and the memories of my son were stretched thinner as I built a new home and a new family and new memories of those couches.

We decided to buy new couches, and I could handle that. But the old couches, The Couches, must stay in our living room until we were sure that the new family sectional was a good fit.

So every morning the memories and couches greet me, assaulting me with reality. People live, but people die. My beautiful daughters don't know how every breath I take both rewards and punishes me. They still jump and play on the old couches, unaware how The Couches are haunting me.

It's January. And I'm fucking sad. I'm sitting on my new reclining sectional, plugged in to its power source, with my cocktail in its built-in cup holder, grieving the 9 year old couches in the next room.  Grieving the Andrea who died the day she learned her son would die.

Countdown to D-Day has begun.