My Couch Ate My Ambition

I did not choose the couch. The couch chose me.

At thirty-seven, I was a person with plans. Italian fluency (the Duolingo owl still haunts my dreams). A gym membership (the treadmill has never seen my face). A novel (seventeen first pages, zero second chapters). Then I bought a beige sofa from a salesman named Gary, and my ambition disappeared—one crumb at a time.

This is not a self-help book. It is a surrender document.

My couch speaks in rumbles and hums. It has a gravitational pull stronger than physics. It whispers things like, "The remote is under the left cushion" and "You've done enough." My dining chair, bar stool, and a footstool in a garish floral pattern staged an intervention. My friend Marcus tried to exorcise the couch with sage and Gregorian chants. He fell asleep. The couch won.

Part parable, part confession, part furniture-based stand-up routine, My Couch Ate My Ambition is for anyone who has ever canceled plans to lie down, ignored a notification from a passive-aggressive owl, or felt a deep kinship with a ceiling stain named Gerald.

Spoiler: I never learn Italian. I never go to the gym. I never write the novel. But I do learn the difference between hiding and resting. And I discover that a single green grape, placed on the left armrest each morning, is enough to keep the hunger at bay.