The Corner I Actually Use
The left end of my sofa has a dip in it. Not a broken sag, just a dip shaped roughly like the back of my legs, and the fabric on that arm has gone pale and slightly fuzzy where my elbow lands. If you sat on the right end you would think the sofa was two years newer than it is. Nobody sits on the right end, including me, including on the evenings when there are four of us in here and there is nowhere else to put anyone.
Why that end and not the other
The window is on that side. That is nearly the whole explanation. From about eight in the morning until eleven, the light comes in low over the roofline opposite and lands on the left cushion and a foot of floor beside it. In winter it arrives later and leaves sooner and I follow it, sitting closer to the glass, feet up on the radiator cover until they get too hot and I have to move them.
The right end of the sofa faces a wall with a mirror on it that I hung because the wall looked empty. It is a perfectly good mirror. What it gives me back is a view of the kitchen doorway and the top of the fridge. Nobody wants that view at half past eight in the morning with a cup in both hands.
What has collected around it
On the floor by that arm: a mug ring on the boards that is not coming out, a phone charger with tape around the cable near the plug, two books, a pair of reading glasses, and a small dish that was meant for salt and now holds hair ties and one earring whose partner I have given up on. None of that was placed. It gathered, the way silt gathers at a bend in a river.
I have tried to tidy it into a basket. The basket lasted a fortnight before I stopped putting things in it, because the point of a book on the floor is that you can reach it without sitting up. A basket adds a lid-shaped decision to a moment when I have no decisions left in me.
The room I set up for sitting
Across from all of this is the armchair. I chose it, I saved for it, and I sat in it in the shop for a long time while a very patient man waited. It is a good chair and it is in the wrong part of the room, and I have known this for about four years.
Twice I have moved it toward the window and twice I have moved it back, because in front of the window it blocks the path to the balcony door, and I use that door every day in summer and about twice a week in winter to shake out a tea towel or stand in the cold for a minute. A chair that is one degree more comfortable is not worth a doorway.
So the armchair sits where it looks right and the sofa end is where I live. That is the gap between a room that photographs well and a room that gets used, and I no longer think one of them is honest and the other is a lie. They are doing two different jobs.
Light is most of it
When I have walked into a friend’s house and felt comfortable within a minute, it has almost always turned out to be about where the windows are. A kitchen with a west window where everyone ends up leaning at six in the evening. A landing at the top of the stairs with a skylight, where people go to take phone calls. Nobody planned those spots. They wore in.
I think we pick our corners the way cats do, which is by temperature, light, and a wall at our back. My spot has all three. It also has a draught in February that comes under the window frame and hits my left ankle, and I sit there anyway, with a blanket over the ankle, because the light wins the argument.
What I have stopped buying for the rest of the room
Once I noticed how narrow my actual use was, I got slower about everything else. The dining table seats six and has held six people maybe three times. The second bookshelf is half books and half things I would rather not look at, turned spine inward. I am not going to pretend I have solved that shelf. I am only less inclined now to buy something for a part of the room that has never once held my body for a full hour.
What I did do was make the used corner better in small, boring ways. A floor lamp that reaches over the arm, so I am not reading by a bulb behind my own head. A side table low enough that I can put a cup down without looking. A cushion that is genuinely too firm for anything except propping up my back, which is all I ask of it.
The dip stays
Someone once told me to rotate the cushions so the wear evens out. I did it for a while. Then I realised I was distributing the evidence of a good habit across a piece of furniture for the benefit of nobody at all, so I stopped, and the dip came back inside a month.
The sofa will be replaced eventually, and whatever arrives next will develop its own dip at its own left end, near whatever window I have then. That seems fine to me. A room that shows where you sit is not a room that has gone wrong.
