Excert from essay on Perhaps the World Ends Here and Rewrite
“The Couch At the End of the World”
by
Michael Liggett
Our lives surround the family room couch. No matter what it is in our lives, we gather here
together.
The warmth’s and comforts of home are set around us. It has been such since we arrived hear
and turned this house into a home, and a home it will always be.
We set the dogs off of it but keep nearby at our feel. Keeping close we hold tight our youngest
and newest members. We open their eyes to this sacred place.
The children scatter themselves around it, filling the room with playful joy as we lounge
together. Here sit all generations, young and old.
Here we gather, as individual and as one…as family
Here we fight our battles and embrace our love. We show our true selves, scars and all.
Battles one and lost make no difference in the love that fills this piece of our home,
We laugh, we cry or just gather in complacence of thought
This couch has been our safe place, our saving grace in this house turned home.
We begin our evenings and end our nights in this very spot. It is our place and sits in
the light that shines away the shadows of our lives.
We welcome here one and all, young and old as family regardless of blood or not.
It is here that we unite.
Upon this couch we laugh with joy and sing our sorrows. We embrace our love
so as to quench our sorrows. We give thanks for our blessed lives.
Maybe it is here, this couch, which our world ends while we waste away into the emotions
of our lives and joy of being amongst each other.
For the days of past, the world truly did begin and end at the kitchen table. It gathers around it all and provides a space to feast and live. It represents a time and a place where families once gathered in joy, anger and sorrow but always united even through the most scarring battles of passion. It aided as a space to bring into this world created new life as well as a space to say goodbye to those who have left it. It is now a place of nostalgia for today we make little time for others, even those closest to us, to gather and grow as one or to learn in unity. Though we can gather on the family room couch the generations older will never have the power or ability to instill upon the generations younger the elements that make a life a true life, the world a true world. The kitchen table is still a solemn place, but a place that in this world of today has been displaced, discarded, taken for granted and will soon be all but forgotten and lost.