As it is, my studio apartment is not so big, and still I circumscribe my location further, to the area of one used IKEA loveseat, yellow, corduroy cover. The couch is not old but has been around long enough to have situated several activities of note. For example: The writing of this essay. Television-through-the-internet. The seasonal migration of morning light through the oldness and dustiness of the window. Bouts of staring at the neighbor's deck, the sky behind, the future. The act of becoming closer to some people through proximity. Growing apart from others through the same. Every moment that had passed before this couch, so much time spent buzzing around and around and what is there to say about it? It doesn't feel like real life, missing the gravity of this particular piece of furniture, my life in this particular configuration. Like a cliff I have climbed up without knowing and now what.

*

As of this writing, the Wikipedia entry on "staycation" includes a warning. This page has some issues.

*

Circa 2008–2009, a period during which domestic economics were not so hot, staycation became a term, something you might read in print just like that, no accompanying explanation. Happened that I was not staying anywhere at the time. I was neither working nor vacationing exactly, but neither was I staying put. I was in India. But first I was in Alaska, then I was in Montana. And then I was in India. For six months, I was more or less looking at stuff and visiting family intermittently, though I doubt it counted as vacation inasmuch as I had nowhere else to be. I was not alone in this, I was in a relationship. We had gone together, vacating a sense of what our lives should have been at that stage and filling it with movement. It was not so long ago but seems ancient. She hated vacation, the idea of it, and though I pretended I understood, I still can't say why. Something to do with industriousness and labor, to do with ambition, production, to do with a physical discomfort learning how much her partner liked not working.

*

While it might appear to an observer that I sit here alone, the only motion being fingers typing or maybe the laptop fanning itself, weirdly it feels just the opposite. Like a continual process of leaving. And like anyone in the middle of leave taking, not yet alone.

*

The word first applied to those who would vacate urban residences to fill up seasonal ones. Vacation, the idea of it, carries with it the presumably healing powers of pure, unoccupied time, time that has been emptied of obligation. But if your time is unoccupied, does that in turn suggest that you are left without the force of occupation? If you are taken out of time or the time is taken out of you, what is left and shouldn't that be terrifying?

If we can't afford to be the ones on vacation, at least we can desire to afford to be elsewhere. But if too few are available to buy into such usage, we need a new word to market to the stranded class. To staycate. To empty yourself, right where you are, sitting on the couch. As if you had internalized the physical house that you were supposed to leave vacant during the summer, so that you yourself are what is left, temporarily uninhabited. According to one newspaper's definition, "a proper staycation is doing what you want to do," which is kind of radical. The idea that during your workaday life you are actually dreaming of the Bahamas, a dream that is itself a layer to be peeled back, under the sunset palm tree of which is actually you again, right where you are, wanting nothing else, wanting nothing.

*

Peeling back location leads us necessarily to Southern California or the idea of it, which I gave up, too. Meaning I was once swathed in the dry gold I remember surrounding childhood always and I traded it for comfort, for a comforter, in this case the cheapest duvet in the 2001 IKEA catalog. When you purchase something with down in it, means you are leaving Southern California. You would not think this duvet was anything fancy, but it had enough loft to keep at least two bodies warm through the particulars of winter in three states over a period of six years give or take.

At this point the duvet is like tissue. A grid of clumpy, squarish pouches, sewn together into a series of densities, repeating, irregular. Which suggests an opposite series when I hold it up to the window, irregular pouches of light where sun piles and falls through. The duvet is white except this one square and old enough that I remember the cat who peed on that square but cannot remember the name of the cat. Have I given up on the duvet? No, I have not.

*

She is not from California. Though she might be the only other person I know who has made a similar circuit, that is, having spent time in Los Angeles, Missoula, Philadelphia. No, that's not entirely accurate. There's one other I know of: David Lynch. In fact, David Lynch was also in India in 2009. But to my knowledge he has never sat on my couch.

*

I have been watching television, re-watching Twin Peaks, and have found the exercise deeply fruitful. Actually we have been watching it. The show is about so much. About losing in a sad and necessary way more than is found. Maybe like a soap opera except more traumatic and also with more "magic", this is what Agent Cooper calls it. It is about twin peaks, neither peak of which is real, but taken together—you learn this over the course of the show—are really near where I used to live in Missoula, Montana. Near, in fact, to an art gallery I visited once, filled with grass, the attendant of which once gave me her phone number which is amazing, a number she has not changed in the intervening years. The grass was not wheat but hung down just like it from the ceiling under which we sat on a bench, close enough I think, to touch. This current loveseat is wider, we no longer have to touch.

*

There is a light, a lightness that comes with having a job. I have a job, a warm place in the great chain of being to which I am unaccustomed, which comes in exchange for the densities of gray that constitute the city of Philadelphia, grays pinched by exquisite flecks of bright trash. My friend's daughter played a game the whole way home from the party, the first day I moved here, like the sidewalk was lava, stepping only on islands of trash, island to island. What a miracle that people my age are in gorgeous and successful relationships and have gorgeous and successful four-year olds. What good fortune there is a material impervious to heat and to harm, lava-proof.

*

What is Southern California like? When I was 12, I was at a bar with David Lynch. I told him it was pretentious and that I didn't get it, referring to a television series entitled Twin Peaks, and I'd like to take that comment back. It is also true that I'd seen a total of one mid-season episode, likely from the second season. For my uncle's sake I hope Mr. Lynch was enjoying the Volcano Sauce, which is his specialty and everyone should try that sauce. The bar was my uncle's at his restaurant in West LA. Trendy for the moment, it had recently garnered several favorable reviews, and he had taken a moment from a frenetic Saturday night to say something animatedly about David Lynch, which I didn't totally catch but nevertheless took as an opportunity to speak loudly regarding my feelings about said show which is what I was like at 12 until it was made clear my uncle was merely indicating I was perched next to the director. Mr. Lynch, I am so sorry.

*

Just like Montana, the show is about light. It is about this one shaky klieg light that is plugged into all these scenes that are otherwise lit how you imagine Hollywood would light scenes dreaming of Montana in the '90s. Agent Cooper about to receive a message. An evil owl flying through otherwise dark woods. Even the greedy businessman issuing a speech to the Confederate army, in the process of losing his shit. Suddenly everything falls away but this harsh circle of light. The light itself is not bad, but it is not good. The last decade of the millennium and television momentarily comes apart searching for its true heart with a cold cold eye. The possibility there might be nothing to light upon.

*

Months after we stopped watching television together, we went to an exhibit of his work, paintings mostly. David Lynch's first museum retrospective and he chose Philadelphia where he had attended art school. It seemed significant. We were no longer roommates. So very many paintings, like no one could decide what to leave out. Or more likely no one felt they had the right to say they had made a decision. Wall after wall hung with these dark lumpy cartoons, which comprise most of his recent output. We paced around the exhibit wanting, I think, to feel something, spark of recognition, that combination of a thing pure and hyper-stylized but also evil and weird and sad. We were at least dutiful. We examined every single piece, for something to capture our attention, something electric, or at least something either of us could say we remembered.

*

To staycate. It is a bad thing. Unseemly to say and to look at. So new that maybe it will leach out of the language before it is entrenched. A word plucked from the internet and mobilized to sell to the recessed. To maximize what would otherwise be at a minimum to those experiencing a recession. But there is something seductive, desperately inventive, about the language of markets and marketing. A secret truth held out in the open. So much I will never totally get.

For one thing: presumably vacation is an activity you do with others, with friends, with loved ones. At the very least, there's the bond shared with everyone else who ever decided to vacation in that same spot. Whereas staycating has to be some kind of inner state, a voluntary, temporary worldview, and is that something you can ever share? Even if you happen not to be alone, can you really staycate with others or is it necessarily a solitary activity?

*

Philadelphia is less gold than California. Dull skies under which, even if the two of us have the IKEA duvet, even if the radiator cranks because landlord is paying, we are not warm, we are sweating but we are no longer warm, which will no longer be a concern when she leaves for real because by then the month will presumably be warm enough. Or am I leaving? I am leaving her, which means I will stay on the couch while she goes somewhere else.

We are roommates during this interim because of financial hardship, that is what we tell ourselves. The thing is after our hardship, we will both be left. This apartment, these six months, monuments to something pouring out, and when it is done pouring the apartment may be emptied but we will still be here, except without comfort or comforter and it might be my fault. The down fluff from the duvet keeps escaping, which I chase around and around my room, the chasing of which only contributes to the general snowiness. Some of this is a lie. I will probably still have the duvet, though it is hard to repair and weighs less and less.

*

What was said was and then a blank. It was very late and we were at the edge of something. I did not feel, not loved, not love. That's not what I said. We were to move to Philadelphia together and after we were moving to Philadelphia separately. Was a long time coming. Were always moving not loving not fucking. The surprise was total. Six years is a long time. Always the caveats. After it is difficult. Is a long surprise. To separate even if you are apart. Which is where we were, on the couch.

*

I want so bad for the answers to the problems to appear excruciatingly light. I want clean and muscular syllables to see me through. Portmanteaus doing the magic of turning the recession into a sales event. The names of chirpy startups, of brave new pharmaceuticals, of catalog color options. The quadrant of the Swedish language, for example, reserved for IKEA. Words we feel but will never quite get, syllables that ring across the two parts of the throat—supply, demand—making a shape but refusing to fill it.

Mysa, for example, is Swedish for either a line of duvets or a verb that means something like Snuggle or Cuddle, except a verb that can curiously indicate either a shared or a solitary activity, which maybe sheds light on what it means to staycate. Or if I want to be a stickler, I should say Cuddle Wheat, which describes my specific duvet model. A field of grain in the middle of which is a solitary cuddler cuddling. Then there's Klippan, the Cliff, apparently describing the steep face of my couch or otherwise connoting its cliffy qualities, that it is in some capacity a threshold, precipitous and one way.

*

As you may remember, Margaret looks like a friend's mom in round red glasses who lost her husband in a fire and now walks around speaking for a log she cradles in two arms. In the special introductions attached to each episode when the show was syndicated years after it first aired, Margaret gets a different light, warm and constant and of a cheaper film stock that makes it a tiny comfort. As you may remember she pronounces some endearing non-sequitur in each of these special introductions that may or may not have to do with the episode that follows, that may or may not end in quiet tears as you watch on a couch on a cliff beside the person with whom you were going to share this apartment and maybe the rest of your life and maybe you will do neither.

*

Sometimes, well let's say all times, things are changing. We are judged as human beings on how we treat our fellow human beings. How do you treat your fellow human beings?

What precedes episode twenty-four, for example.

At night, just before sleep, as you lay by yourself in the dark, how do you feel about yourself? Are you proud of your behavior? Are you ashamed of your behavior?

You know in your heart if you have hurt someone, you know. If you have hurt someone, don't wait another day before making things right. The world could break apart with sadness in the meantime.

Though it could be twenty-five, depends on your version.

*

The text message in its entirety: Is that old yell?

*

And then two years and then a text message. Two years and I have a new place, smaller, one with a couch-sized alcove with a couch in it right near the radiator. I am still seated. Who texts me is a friend in the throes of apartment hunting, who is referring casually to Yellow, to a mass-produced smallish sofa with a summery slipcover and a nickname apparently. A screenshot accompanies, a current listing for a rental unit (2 BDRM Heat Included !!!) with a sunny if low-resolution interior, unpeopled as such depictions are.

I am in my new place but here glaring up is the old place, same photo I took to post the vacancy when we moved out two years ago. Same short rug, standing lamp, dining chair with a woman's felt coat and in the center, left of center: Yell. Faulty paperweight memory, two years and the old place threatens to fly, the fact of which is obvious but not often present except it is now under the empty gravity of this screenshot. Of thrift interior decoration and uneasy domesticity and surgically prolonged heartbreak and old landlord's baffling faith that this is what entices renters. An apartment familiarly configured for at most two people to stare not at each other but at something on the coffee table, an attractive coffee table book or maybe the open laptop perched there, a configuration that no longer takes space yet travels up through the phone's screen in my hand, unmoving as I am, I cannot look away, stretched across the full width of the only soft seating in the room. What will happen? Where will I sit?

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Afraid I got more in common with who I was than who I am becoming. [link]