Moving On: How to Live on a Recliner and Why

In the very late part of last year, when snow was busy bombarding me with the full realization that when it comes to the location of my atoms and existence I may well have made a terrible geographic mistake, I tore apart my old bed with a baseball bat and purchased an air bed. There are two why's that should be asked there and as most people are rational, I will answer the first query right off the bat. Simply put, I didn't own a wrench. Or a hammer. Or one of those little screwdrivers that wouldn't have worked even if I'd owned it. And though a part of me wanted to do right by that bed, I also was rather bored and knew I'd always put it off if I didn't take action. 

Baseball Bat Enters the Scene.

As for the second question, why, well that one is oddly enough a little more complex. It was the earworm brainchild of an offer from a friend who was, at the time, in the process of contemplating the notion of vacating his lease in a rather cozy and pleasant apartment. As I was a man who loves all things cozy and pleasant, I took him up on an offer to move into his place at earliest convenience for us both and I tore apart my bed so I could begin again in a new place with one that didn't torment me with malicious springs. I purchased an airbed to tide me over and slept nights with thoughts of new things, "new" being the driving word as I was rapidly approaching year eight of my current apartment and the walls had become ever so dreadfully dull, and waiting for the stars to align. 

Sadly, as life goes, It soon became apparent that those stars were meteors and Bruce Willis would never arrive to save my solitary world in time.

The apartment offer dried up in a flash of those thoughts where you squint with the wonder of "Oh my. There's a chance he's not going to leave.", my airbed of countless five-star Amazon durability reviews promptly stabbed itself and proceeded to constantly deflate with such manic efficiency that I was often brought back to the waking world with the unpleasant sensation of being adrift in one's own apartment. I don't like water that much and I loathe drowning, one of those probably being a byproduct of the other, and for two weeks I was snatched from sleep by feelings of the latter as my unrepentant airbed tried repeatedly to swallow me whole.

As with all great sharks, even the ones made or rubber that come in boxes, I don't think it would've even left a trace. 

I could've found the hole, I think. I looked multiple times but I don't think I looked too hard and instead decided to throw the whole thing away, Sic Semper Tyrannis after all, and I looked at my tiny recliner that I believe to this day was stolen off the set of a movie focused around either very small adults or very large children and thought, "That seems about right." I like to think that it was because I was being very rational and understood quite rightly that $80 was an expense I couldn't afford, but in all likelihood I probably just felt betrayed by an inanimate object and held it against him accordingly.

Do you ever get the feeling that people don't understand you? I do. I go long stretches over the course of which people try to tell me what I'm doing and why, and they do try mightily, only to eventually segue into varying mutterings that generally have to do with the confusion that my life sometimes (some would say "often") seems to embrace. There's often laughter and jokes at my expense, all of which are earned, and then those things subside until the question is forgotten and left saved and wrapped in tinfoil for a later date. The recliner that became my bed was the source of such things a great many times and even though I had my reasons, I never cared to mention them. 

It didn't matter, not really. Or rather, the only person it mattered to was me. 

See, I realized on one of those early winter mornings when the hope of moving into an apartment that hadn't yet vanished was still new that I probably wouldn't leave if I stayed in that same bed, staring at that same ceiling, pondering those same thoughts. If my world remained where it was and my mind with it, I'd stay in the same place it'd felt like I'd always been. Why? Because I used to like comfortable things, I used to hate risks, and I never once met an unknown prospective future that I wasn't happy to pass up for the known I already possessed. 

I didn't like who I was back then. I thought of that version of me as a rather weak-minded fellow who looked through rose-colored glasses at discomfort and the status quo until he was happy enough to stay there and it was a version that had flourished for many years. So on that cold and wintry night, laying on an airbed that I'd re-inflated for the third time that day, I came to a decision that I needed to do drastic things for the sake of myself. I needed to throw out all the things that were holding me down in the depths of my own subconscious shortcomings and I needed to start running and never look back. 

I walked out into the snow that night somewhere around two in the morning to toss my bed in a dumpster that had always been far too small and, when I wandered back inside and the shivers had stopped, I snagged a pillow and a blanket and holed up on that little recliner that was only slightly more comfortable than it looked and vowed to let things expire until I had no choice but to leave and finally find some other apartment that seemed a little more like home. 

"Home"

I've never much felt attached to that word. I had a home as a child and I visit there often, but I've never had a home since. I've lived places, I've slept places, and I've made memories in those places, but never once did I feel at home. I just 'was' and I used to spend days wondering if that's how everyone felt or if it was just me. That part I never figured out, or at least I haven't so far, but I do know that in another world, in another life, I might've been a nomad and wandered until I could wander no more. Either that, or I would've cared so little for my own location that wasn't a home that I never would've left my apartment and metamorphosed into that weird hermit who rented the same two-bedroom slot for thirty years until he realized he'd made a terrible mistake. 

I didn't want to be that hermit. In truth, I'm odd enough already. 

So in the end, January became February, February became March, March became April, and April became May. And I slept sleepless nights every night on my bed that wasn't a bed for the sake of forcing myself from a life I might never have left otherwise. I'd found ruts to be far too comfortable before, whether in my personal or professional life, and though I'm not always good at avoiding them as I'm not the best driver, I've finally started to see them for what they are when they are. You see...it's all a trick, a joke, and someone's laughing at us at all times even if they don't understand why we do the things we do. It doesn't mean our methods are wrong, they're just ours, and it doesn't mean recliners don't often make the bed you need.

And the bed you need is so much more important than the bed you want. 

I moved out of my old apartment with its rotting walls and halfway-house appeal on June 1st. I moved into a cozy little apartment up north that's cozy in the right way, like a launching pad and not a rut, and it even has a porch. Sometimes I look back on those old rooms that were never a home and all their memories both good and bad and I wonder if this one will be different. I wonder if one day I'll look across the table at a friend or family member and say the words I've never really said or meant since I was a child, "I'm going home."

If I had to guess, I don't think I will. I find it far more likely that this was the beginning of an avalanche and I like to think that I'll soon find myself running as fast as I can towards the finish line of this life. Not because I'm a morbid person thirsting for mortality, no...but because I think life needs to be lived like thunderous rocks spilling down mountainsides, like snow-brought wreckage spilling through trees, and like an adventure that sometimes needs the biggest and boldest push to set everything in motion. My push wasn't that bold, not yet, but it was just the right size for me and I'm living somewhere I've never lived before for the sake of no one else but me. 

That makes me happy and I've rarely been accused of being any such thing. Most days I just 'am'. Most days I'm so much less than what the voices in my head that might be a conscience seem to want me to be. But today I'm sitting in my new apartment, trying to figure out how to work an air conditioner that isn't four hundred years old, and typing a meandering blog for the sake of the precious few who seem to care about what I do with the day after day that is my life. And do you know the strangest thing? Whether it's because of the new place or the drive to be so much more than what was never really gone but often beaten down, I feel quite at home here.

Not the home, not yet, but perhaps one day I will look back on this time and think what a wonderful choice I made. I'll thank that friend of mine who decided to keep the apartment I liked the idea of but didn't really want. I'll thank my baseball bat for being there when I desperately needed to destroy the bed that was holding me to my youth in more ways than I could count. And I'll thank that silly little recliner that was just comfortable enough to tide me through some long nights and just uncomfortable enough to push me towards the new start that I so desperately craved. 

Sometimes we do strange things for our own betterment. Sometimes it's because its necessary, sometimes it's because we're strange people. I don't know which category I fall under, but I do know one thing: I slept in a recliner for five months to finally escape the last seven years because I knew myself better than anyone else. I knew what I had to do to start over, no matter how odd, no matter how uncomfortable, and no matter how sleepless.

And I don't regret a single thing.