Fixing IKEA with a friend on sunday by Ole Jensen
‘There is a sort of love’ I say, to fill the emptiness
Of the room with something other than a future Ektorp,
The clouds from my mouth testifying to the little less space:
‘A sort of love, isn’t there, in how furniture is designed to slot together?’
He stares blankly before telling me, that’s what the damn chair is meant to do.
We trekked to IKEA earlier that week
to fill his flat with something other than ourselves.
There is a loneliness apparent when you are aware of your aliveness.
What better way than to clutter the house with obstacles to distract ourselves,
From the curse of being more fragile than that one chipped tile in the bathroom wall?
We did, of course, have his father’s chair in the corner.
You can see that he was a fidgeter; the paint scabs gently under
His restless legs, the wood softens into a depression remembering his hips.
My friend has sat in it a few times. The paint began to peel after a week of him
Shifting and shoving and leaning. He complains that the chair doesn’t remember him
But how can one remember an imprint of what it held?
Later that night, when our hands intertwine, the lamp serving as witness,
I start to think about a toothcomb; how tightly interlocked this gentle love became
Designed to contain something else within, how our fingers straightened make a steeple,
Housing something beyond our sight: the same love, as the chair designed to hold his father.
“It made me sad, thinking about passing things on and over. Accidentally making IKEA meatballs taste of existentialism at the age of 19 was not part of my plan! It also felt like it was a bit off balance in terms of what I wanted to portray?”
Olivia is a second year student at university with an unhealthy obsession with 'A House on Mango Street' by Sandra Cisneros. When times stops running and starts to amble, you will find her hobbies very much overlap with those of a cat: napping on warm floors, people watching from a tall vantage point, and kneading loaves.