The Chair Nobody Sat In

We bought it for the company we were going to have. The good company, the long evenings, the friends who would say what a lovely flat. It is the colour of a decision made together, mustard, which neither of us would have chosen alone, which is how I know it was really ours. Nobody ever sat in it. We sat on the sofa, side by side, saving the chair for a future that turned out to be a kind of furniture itself — something we owned and did not use. Now I sit in it every night, deliberately, the way you take a medicine. It is not comfortable. It was never meant to hold one person. But somebody should sit in the future we bought. Somebody should wear it down.