A large turquoise colored sectional with light blue walls behind it. There’s a small round coffee table in front of the couch, un-hung pictures on one side of it, and a pile of opened boxes on the other side.

Me, My Couch, and I

Carley Moore
6 min readJun 10, 2021

After reading Nicole C. Kear’s sad and funny essay, “What I Learned About the Pandemic When My Kid Got Trapped in a Couch,” I started thinking about what my couch has meant to me during the pandemic.

I moved in the middle of the pandemic, last June. I hadn’t planned to move, but I was living in a faculty apartment in a dorm and that gig was ending in a year. The students were forced to move out, and increasingly, it was just my kid, my cat, and one other adult, in a building that usually housed almost 300 people. To say the halls felt haunted would be an understatement.

Because of a strange feature of the COVID Cares Act, I was able to take out enough money from my retirement account for a down payment on a large one-bedroom apartment in a 1930s coop in Flatbush, Brooklyn. The money was so heavily taxed, I now owe the IRS more money than I can probably ever raise in the next three years, but hey I’m privileged and lucky enough to have a retirement account. I took the money and ran, right to realtor, and then I spent five months doing paper work.

The couch arrived on moving day. At $2500 it was by far the most expensive piece of furniture I’d ever owned. I bought in on an installment plan, on one of the days after my then girlfriend and I broke up. We broke up a lot, but this time it stuck and I wanted a big comfy sectional to wallow in with me, myself, and…

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Carley Moore
Carley Moore

Written by Carley Moore

Prof type, single mama, and disabled queerdo // Books: The Not Wives; 16 Pills; Panpocalypse (March 2022)

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