New Love Story:

I was treading through the snow filled streets of Toronto when I found it. Neutral Milk Hotel was screaming in my ears and I was screaming out my mouth, "Why would anyone throw this out?" Dialing was made nearly impossible with my winter gloves. Still I found a way to carefully punch in each number with my swollen cotton fingers. "ring, ring". I waited impatiently for him to answer. "Ring, ring" The slowest four rings of my life. He picked up. "Hello?"
"Adam. What are you doing? Actually, I doesn't matter what you're doing. You have to get over here! I just found the most amazing..." "Jamie? Is this Jamie?" I could hear his son yelling in the background.
"Yes it's me! Now listen carefully! There's not much time! I need you to drive to Eglinton and Avenue. Some idiot threw out a..."
"Hold on. I can barely hear you."
The conversation went on like this for at least 20 minutes before I could get out the reason for my call.
"ADAM! Someone threw out a couch and I need you to get over here so we can get it back to my place before anybody else grabs it. Do you understand?"
"Yeah, yeah. Give me 10 minutes".
It would be more like 30.
I hung up with him and dusted off the snow gathering on the left cushion of my couch. There I sat, waiting in the cold, surrounded by an overflowing dumpster and soggy stack of phonebooks. While waiting, I pictured the couches and my life together. We would snuggle together in the afternoons with a good book and cup of tea, when my friends came to visit the couch would provide them a cozy place to sleep. We would make the transition of moving out of my parents house to my own little loft in the city together, and more importantly, we would always be together. Adam drove up in his old beat up Honda. "Is that it?" He asked through the passenger side window.
"Do you see another couch Adam?"
He strutted over in his navy blue jump suit and terminator shades. I jumped off with help from the old springs and greeted him with a hug. A moment of thought followed, and a moment of realization after that. "Ugh. I don't think that will fit in or on the car. How many blocks is your house from here?"
I nervously rubbed my hands together. "I think three. Why?"
A very serious look came over Adam's face. "Because, we're going to have to carry it."
My heart sank into a puddle of defeat and I seriously considered leaving the couch. Three blocks of struggle with something that weighs one of me and three of my clones down a snowy sidewalk next to one of the most congested roads on the North end. Fuck the couch. Still, I couldn't let go to the idea of couches and my life together. I looked at Adam. "Well, go get your gloves on then."
There's no way I could possibly put into words the next 45 minutes. If you're not a Northerner then you'd probably have trouble understanding the difficulty of an already difficult task in temperatures 15 below zero. However, you will understand the problem we faced when we reached my house, squeezing a couch that big through a door that narrow is like trying to push a square block through a triangle shaped hole. Adam must have studied up on Kama-Sutra on his way over because he proved to know several different positions on how to get it in. Haha.

And this the couch. It smelled like homeless man pee and the foam cushions had turned to sand when we first began our lives together. Since then it's been stuffed with goose feathers and scrubbed down. The only scent that remains on the floral print is lilac. Hooray for discoveries.