The Armchair Did Not Do It

"Comfort has never stolen a single year from anyone. Every one of them was handed over willingly."

On a Saturday morning in March, Mirela decided to get rid of her armchair.

It was a big, soft, mustard-colored thing she had inherited from her grandfather. It sagged in the exact shape of a reader, and for three years, it had been the center of her evening. In those same three years, the manuscript she had meant to finish had stayed in a drawer, and Mirela had come to believe the chair was responsible.

"You have been stealing my life, a little every night." She told it, tugging it toward the door.

It took her twenty minutes to wrestle the chair down two flights of stairs. By the time she dropped it at the curb, she was out of breath, and a strange lightness had settled over her. Very good, now I will be able to write.

She climbed back to her apartment, sat at her desk, and opened the drawer.

The manuscript lay there, fourteen pages and one half-finished sentence from three Januaries ago. Her laptop was open beside it. The desk was clear and the lamp worked. There was no cushion, no warmth, nothing to sink into.

She looked at the first page for a long time.

Then she checked her phone, and also made tea. Then she reorganized the shelf beside the window, because that seemed urgent. By noon, she had done everything except the writing she meant to do.

Around three o'clock, she went to the window and looked down at the street. The chair sat alone on the curb, mustard against the gray pavement, waiting for the truck that would not come until Monday. It looked almost embarrassed, she thought.

That very moment, something quiet shifted in her mind.

The chair had not hidden her pen, neither had it taken her laptop away. It had not once called her name or kept her from the desk. For three years it had done only one thing, which was to be a good place to sit. Every evening she had walked over to it on her own legs. Every "tomorrow" had been said in her own voice.

The chair had not stolen her years. She had handed them over, one comfortable evening at a time.

She stood there at the window for a while and decided to something small. She went back to the desk, pushed the half-finished sentence into view, and without sitting down, she wrote the next line standing up.

Although it was a clumsy sentence, but it was a new one.

That night, with a bit of embarrassment and a lot of effort, she carried the chair back upstairs. She did not move it to the center of the room, as before. She put it in the corner, where it became what it had always been: a seat, and not a thief.

Comfort is not your enemy, it is a place to rest. The danger lies in how long you stay, and whose decision it is every evening. Nothing can steal your years unless you keep handing them over, but the same hands can take them back.

Tonight, pick one thing you have been postponing and do one line of it before you take a night rest for the day.

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