Kimberlee K.

Ten years ago I moved into a townhouse with my sister and our friend Kristine.

There is a picture of the three of us that I still have framed, standing in the empty living room, dreaming up the new chapter of our lives.

None of us had gone away to college, and this was the first time we’d live outside our parents’ house. I felt like “it” was finally happening—it being adulthood.

Our landlord, a family friend, had let us keep her dining room table. And for the first few weeks it was cluttered with things trying to find their place.

We were all in and out of Target, making trips to Home Goods, pinning things on Pinterest.

I wanted to decorate the house in a way that might prove that we earned it—that we belonged there, even if, in different circumstances, we would not have been able to afford it.

“I found chairs!” I said one day, carrying my laptop into the living room.

Black wooden chairs with leather cushions.

We agreed to split them, and I was home when they were delivered.

I cut open the box and unwrapped the plastic, sidling them up to the table before taking a picture.

“They’re here!!”

The rest of our furniture was hand-me-downs. Blessings that filled our living room and made our house comfortable. But the chairs were the first thing we bought. An accent to an otherwise quilted interior design scheme.

Over the years, the chairs were pulled out to prop up shoes that needed tying or buckling, to drop purses or jackets or boxes. The chairs hosted dinners and late-night conversations, wine tastings and greasy meals delivered right after the Uber dropped us off. The chairs were dragged into the living room when groups of us filled out brackets watching The Bachelorette or streamed playoff baseball, and dragged into the kitchen, the bathroom, the garage, the backyard, to any corner of the wall where a spider was out of reach to kill.

And then we moved.

At our new apartment, my sister and I set up the same dining room table and unwrapped the plastic on the same black chairs.

They would serve the same purpose, though welcome guests in new contexts, hosting meals my sister made for the man who would become her husband, and conversations with acquaintances that became friends and vice versa.

And then we moved.

In my own apartment, I looked at the boxes of things that, for the first time, were only mine.

I had never decorated a space on my own, was unfamiliar with spreading out, and had to actively remind myself to unpack in more than just my bedroom.

I sidled the chairs up to the same dining room table and cluttered it, strategizing. I dragged them into the kitchen to help unpack dishes, and into my bedroom to hang pictures.

I began to pull the same chair out each time I sat down to eat dinner, and propped my feet on its neighbor on weekend afternoons when I would write. Friends sat in the chairs as we unpacked takeout orders and talked about work, marriage, children, and adulthood, and I stacked the chairs every few weeks when I Swiffered the floor.

And then one day, while daydreaming on the couch, I thought, I want new chairs.

Something softer, lighter. Something that blended. Something that wasn’t, necessarily, the first thing I found in a designated price range. Something intentional, something me.

“These are nice,” the man at the Salvation Army said, helping me carry the black chairs to the donation dock.

“They are.”

I drove away, relieved to be rid of the clutter, excited for the new chairs around my dining room table, but sentimental in a way I didn’t expect.

The chairs were in good shape, they really were still nice. They could have served me for years to come, ushering in guests of all seasons, providing reach to spiders of all sizes, housing conversations at all hours of the day and night.

And perhaps they will for someone else.

Soon they’ll hit the sales floor, newly tagged and stickered, and someone will light up at the sight of them.

“These are perfect!”

They will be sidled up to a new table, in a new room, in a new house, for new people. And they will keep being chairs.

Just chairs, I suppose, but also something more.