In the vapor-choked corners of Appalachian Ohio, where the cicadas drone louder than ambition and the towns wrinkle into their own forgotten names, I came back. Always, I came back.
It wasn’t the family. Not really. It wasn’t the ghosts of coal, or the split-lipped specter of Mamaw smoking Parliaments through a cracked window. It was that damn couch.
That haggard, constipated monument to endurance—the sagging ark of all my failed redemptions. It was never reupholstered. Never scoured. Never judged. It held onto everything the family had lost.
“It wasn’t just any couch; it was a symbol of my past, a relic that had absorbed the essence of my family’s history.”
My mother bled onto it during the great colonostomy collapse in ‘90. My cousin blew a snot rocket into it while we watched scrambled porn in ‘93. I had my first erection on that couch, and it saluted every visit like a returning flag. This was my throne. My confessional. My womb.
Years had passed. I left Jackson, I left Middletown, I left whatever names we whispered for home, chasing sex like it owed me something, chasing jobs that dissolved in daylight. The city was all fluorescent breath and mechanical rejection. Nothing stuck. Nothing held. Except the couch.
“Each romantic entanglement seemed to slip through my fingers, leaving me with a deeper sense of emptiness.”
When I came back in my thirties, the thing was still there—faded like the memory of my grandfather’s fingers on my shoulder, threadbare like family secrets we never wrote down but always whispered through sideways glances.
“Uncle Joe’s old gift had withstood the test of time better than most things in my life.”
I lay on it like a sinner lays on the altar. My weight made it groan—not in protest, but in recognition. The springs accepted me like kin.
“On nights when the weight of solitude pressed down on me, I’d lie on the couch and let its familiarity envelop me.”
It was there, on one such night, that I wore the golden wig.
Not for shame, not for kink, but because I needed to feel beautiful the way my mother looked in 1982—photographed before she fell apart. I became her ghost for a moment. Draped in cigarette smoke and peroxide, I whispered lullabies in my own voice.
The couch held me through it all.
“There was a strange, almost intimate bond that formed between us. It sounds absurd, I know, but that couch understood me in ways no human partner ever had.”
When I touched its arms, I was touching the composite ghost of every failed hug in my lineage. I was petting a chimera made of broken fathers, codependent sisters, and horny cousins who never quite left.
“There was a tactile pleasure in the connection, a sense of grounding that I couldn’t find elsewhere.”
I moaned once. Not in lust, but in deep, ancestral ache. My body remembered. It remembered Ohio in winter, when the heat was off and the couch was our only insulation. It remembered my cousin Jeff watching from the hallway, saying nothing yet moaning audibly. It remembered the silence that covered everything like plastic wrap.
“The couch became a surrogate for the intimacy I craved but couldn’t attain.”
My thighs stuck to the leather. My scent mingled with the mildew. I pressed my cheek into the seat where Mamaw used to sit, hoping to feel her still. I did.
“It was a strange kind of love, one born of necessity and the deep human need for companionship.”
The couch took it all. My sweat. My secrets. My small, trembling gifts as I sobbed in gratitude. And gave nothing but permission in return.
“It wasn’t about replacing human intimacy but finding a unique form of solace.”
Some nights I would wake tangled in its limbs, gasping, dreaming of babies that would never be born, screaming their mouths full of stuffing. Some nights I felt the breath of those who had sat there before me, warming my neck like an incestuous prayer.
“Returning home, I realized that this couch, with its frayed edges and sagging springs, had been a constant in my life.”
Let others laugh. Let them clutch their pearls and cross themselves. They never made love to lineage. They never wept onto vinyl until they hallucinated redemption. This was my confessor. My lover. My matriarch. This was Ohio, incarnate. And when I die, bury me on it. Face down. Legs spread. Wig on. Let my ghost haunt it softly, forever humping the past.