sad chairs

50 Sad Chairs, a project by artist Bill Keaggy.

I love this whole idea. Our relationship to chairs. How they seem without us. How they seem — yes — sad without us. How their loneliness makes us sad, too. Sometimes — actually, most of the time, I think — a chair is not just a chair. If you have a favorite chair, you have a relationship with it. Don’t laugh. You do. There’s an alchemy between a person and their favorite chair. A symbiosis. You are one, you and your chair. I mean, think of a chair you’ve loved. The chair that was the coziest. The softest. The most comfortable. The one that fit your particular lumps perfectly and soothed each and every one of them every time you sat in it, without fail. That chair. If you don’t have it anymore, you miss it. And if you still have it, it’s the place you want to be at the end of a troublesome day. Or any day. The place that welcomes you and holds you and makes you go “ahhhh.” That’s love. You love that chair, whatever kind of chair it is, however old it is, however old you are. You will always love that chair. Maybe even pine for that chair.

When I was 7 years old, for reasons I began to tell in this post and will probably never be able to finish, I began an intense, obsessive, needy relationship with our rocking chair. I mean, I wore that thing out. Probably tested every last spring it had. Maybe even wore out my welcome a million times over while it suffered in stoic silence. But I loved it so. I needed it so. It was a crushed yellow velvet creature with box pleats and was basically glaring and ugly. Actually, it was probably velveteen, now that I think about it. Probably not the real deal or I wouldn’t have been allowed to sit in it. We’d had it for several years and no one in the family sat in it but me. It was mostly considered a good chair, a guest chair, you know? And, well, guests would sit in it, awkwardly, struggling and trying to hide it, but I could always tell because I would watch them. Closely. I wasn’t allowed to sit there if guests were visiting — and that made me kind of antsy, really — so from my quiet swatch of carpet nearby, I’d sneak little anxious peeks at them. The way they squirmed. Their shifting positions. Their restless legs. Their furrowed brows giving it away: Do I sit still here? Do I rock in this thing? Do I sit on the very edge and pretend it’s not a rocking chair? Always, they struggled with it and that’s how I knew that they did not understand the chair. Maybe they resented the chair, even, for the anxiety it put them through. And let’s not forget, it was yellow and glaring and ugly. Stupid chair, I could almost hear them thinking.

But me, I never tried to figure out how to sit in the chair. It was a rocking chair. You rocked. That’s what it did; that’s what you did. I always felt like we understood each other. There was no awkward struggle, no furrowed brow. Just sit and do what the chair is supposed to do. Rock. Rock. Rock again. Simple. And for me, at that time in my life, that chair was a kind of savior. It always embraced me. It was always waiting. It never rejected me. It made no demands. It listened to me. And I swear, it understood. To this day, you cannot tell me that chair did not understand how terrified I’d become of life. Its soft steady rocking was comfort and sympathy to me. And, yes, it was yellow and glaring and ugly, but I always thought it looked like gold. A golden chair in streaming sunlight. Every day, after school, it was the first place I’d go. My brother would instantly charge outside to play. My sister would retreat to our room to do homework. And I would tiptoe to the chair and crawl in. Through the window beside the chair, I could see kids in the park across the street, playing, riding bikes, chasing each other. But I couldn’t do that, couldn’t bring myself to do that. No. I wasn’t ready. Not yet. When I came home after a whole day at school with all those kids who didn’t know how scared I was, what I needed most was to rock in the chair. What I needed most was a break from holding my breath and pretending I wasn’t scared. So the chair let me breathe. Stop pretending. Be a quavering mass of fears until the rocking calmed me down. Let me sleep. Helped me forget.

My family would mock me, call me lazy if I stayed too long in the chair when there was homework or chores to be done, but I needed things right then in that stretch of my life that I could not possibly verbalize. I didn’t have the vocabulary. I was 7 years old, for God’s sake. I didn’t even know the word trauma. What little kid does? I didn’t know what else to do with my mute fears, so I would slink to the golden chair near the big window and let the honey light pour through all the dark places. Every day. Over and over. And I did it all the way through high school. All my life, I’ve struggled to “get over things,” move on, be bouncy! resilient! I don’t get over things easily or quickly; I never have; I probably never will, and I imagine this is where it all started and why I needed that chair so much. I thank God for it. My chair. In the end, that chair knew me, knew things about me, all there was to know, without rejecting me. It knew me and endured me and healed me. That chair gave me grace. Like a savior.

I miss my chair and what we were together.

Because, really, a chair is never just a chair.