Have you ever been to Ikea?
like really really been there.
Tiny colored flags wave Hey! Spelled differently than it sounds. An actual Hej! in bold but simple type guides you gently inside. You feel valkomen as the whispery automatic doors open to a world of endless Swedish design possibilities. Look what you can do with small spaces! Big spaces! Small money! Big money!
West Elm? Underwhelmed. CB2? 2 bad. Pottery Barn - I didn’t write a joke for this one. Sure.. is the quality better? Probably I don’t know. I don’t own anything from them. They’re not for me. Ikea is. Ikea is there for me. Dependable, affordable, strong. Even the Ikea table and chair set I found on the side of the street 4 years ago still gives me butterflies and is only marginally broken.
Once you’re inside the gleaming warehouse, each well crafted room could be your life in another world, another universe where your things are put away in shiny helm dressers! This room? My family and I live in the muted tones of a stylish but family friendly one bedroom in Park Slope. This here is my kitchen (island included) if I lived in the suburbs of Chicago! This? It’s my gothic home office where I write novels and also murdered my husband!
Ikea is a place of magic and imagination. In Ikea you can be whoever you want to be.
Me - twirling from aisle to aisle my face lifted to the sky bathed in a gorgeous haze of particleboard and fluorescent light.
Me? I can be whoever I want to be? I’m not sure what the future holds but today Ikea is my future and it’s as bright as the eco friendly LED bulb in a Sinnerlig pendant lamp
All I know is I have my own bedroom for the first time in my life and the crushing debt of an accelerated 18 month associates degree in digital movie making..
The textiles section. My favorite. OH I just want to drown myself in velvet throw pillows, choke myself in throw blankets, literally kill me in hand woven rugs I don’t care.
But I do care, because each time I pick up an item I put it back. I really don’t need any of this. I have a bed you know, anything more than that would just be excessive.
No. It’s fine. Maybe just look instead. Just being in Ikea is fun enough right?
Oh…but curtains.
If you can believe it - my definitely legal new bedroom doesn’t have any windows and I want to put curtains behind my bed to trick my brain into thinking a window is there and also it’ll look kind of like a canopy.
Ok how much are they?
Twelve dollars??? That’s nothing! Yes IKEA this is why I LOVE YOU. let’s buy them. You can’t go to Ikea without getting one thing.
But I got food already. I can’t go to Ikea without eating in the cafeteria? It’s ok to buy food, I have to eat.
I don’t need these curtains to live.
Maybe… I should ask Dad?
Has every decision I ever made from birth til now the wrong one in his eyes? Like EVERY decision? Like anything from how I fold a towel, the people I want to date, reading Ella Enchanted instead of Animal Farm?
Sure yeah maybe.
Did he throw my copy of Ella Enchanted out the window of our moving car and say “stop reading fairytales?” Yeah.. but surely he wouldn’t be upset if I bought some curtains.
Maybe I should just call him and ask.
Wait what the fuck? No, why would I call Dad? I haven’t lived at home in 3 years. I pay my bills, I pay my rent, I do not need to call him.
I don’t know. I just don’t know if it’s a good idea to buy the curtains.
Ever have a panic attack before? It kind of feels like falling into a black hole. Everything is too loud. Too many people are inside this room and brushing up against me. My thoughts are spinning around really fast inside my head and I try to pluck just one out to hold on to it. Anything to feel like I have control of something. A decision to buy curtains feels like a not securely anchored Billy bookcase that toppled on my chest and I’m not sure I’m strong enough to push it off of me. Just leave me here to die.
Why is it so hard for me to do such simple things? Why can’t I make small decisions on my own? Because what if I make the wrong one? These curtains could instead be another student loan payment. That my dad so graciously co-signed out of the goodness of his heart and is definitely not using the fact that I needed his signature to afford school as a way to have control over me in every aspect of my existence until I die or he dies. Hahah what?
No I’m just looking thank you so much.
This is so stupid.
But also playing devil’s advocate here. Dad doesn’t even really know you. Maybe to him curtains are stupid but to you it’s a pretend window in your windowless room, it’s picking up the copy of Ella Enchanted off the side of the road and finishing the book in spite of him and loving it.
An announcer crackles over the PA system. 15 minutes until close.
What? Fuck how long have I been in the textiles section...
I couldn’t resist workshopping a Pottery Barn joke:
- “Pottery Barn? Pottery Darn—I wish they had better merchandise”
- “Pottery Barn? How-‘bout-nottery Barn”
- There has to be 3, so maybeee, “Pottery Barn? More like, Rule-of-threes Barn.”