Old Furniture

On some days, I feel like old furniture covered with dusty white sheets. The sheets are meant to protect and safeguard, but also hide. It is meant to create an impression of everything is fine underneath. Everything is normal.

It does that particularly well.

Every passerby, every traveller; all they see is the crease less covering. The covering that doesn’t let anything on. The covering that deceives.

The furniture sits there…waiting? Not necessarily, not entirely anyways. Perhaps, some part of it yearns to be seen, crumpled under a stronger part that screams not to fall into the naivety of waiting.

It knows no one is arriving. Not because they don’t care, but because the furniture sits tightly, underneath. It does not creak

Or fall

Or break.

It doesn’t even cry.

No one can tell it is hurting, struggling to be seen.

But on some days, on some fine days, the wind blows and the sheet falls over. An edge of the rusty old sofa reveals itself. The sofa in its true worn off form. It encapsulates within itself everything that it witnessed; countless tears, moments of surprise slightly coloured by joy, the anxiousness of an impending delight, the silence before a painful news.

And through everything, particularly the moments in time that were colored by a sense of ache, it has gotten weary.

Little does it know, the world does not care. As a matter of fact, someone is going to cover it up with the white armour again, trampling underneath all the childish hopes that it held of being comforted

And loved

And protected

Most of all, understood.

Little does it know, the world only offers comfort

and love

And protection

And understanding

To those who do not break trying to mimic perfection.

Love comes with a hidden tag of ‘as long as you’re good and easy’.

It does not have room for the messy bits, despite the countless love poems and books where the boy who wasn’t the ‘perfect kid’ still managed to earn the loving grasp of his parents arms.

The world, and all its inhabitants, only choose to love what is easy to do so.