or: Saying goodbye isn’t always hard

My getting rid of things started eight years ago.

You would have thought it would have started with my move to HK twelve years ago.

It didn’t.

That particular adventure started with putting quite a lot of things into our attic in Sydney as one of my Best Women was going to be living in our place while we were away. Yes, we did get rid of some things but not much. Our downsizing was more in what we decided to take with us. That also wasn’t a lot. We left all our furniture in the attic and some out for her to use.

Eight years ago was the start of a different adventure.

That was when my marriage ended and was the beginning of the end for quite a few other things that were in my life at that time.

Including the cat.

That said, the cat was only the second thing to go.

Side note – Long time readers could be forgiven for thinking the cat would be the first. This just proves I can be patient when needed. My (ex-) husband was going to take him when he settled into his new place. I scored because our dog stayed with me.

The first was a big black leather couch and matching chair, all of which could recline.

I hated that couch.

The cat, I didn’t like him so much either.

I had never liked the couch.

I had briefly liked the cat.

When he was a kitten.

For a few months before he started repeatedly attacking me.

Anyway, the couch was bought not long after our arrival in HK as we had tired of sitting on a mattress. We weren’t uni students anymore so it was about time we furnished our place properly. We had finally bought a bed so the mattress we had been using on the floor to sleep then became a de facto couch. At least we no longer needed to move it from the bedroom to the lounge room.

That said, I was still unemployed at this stage so perhaps we could have done the mattress as a bed / couch thing for a little longer. I’m not sure that would have helped though.

My (now ex-)husband had spotted a leather couch in one of his lunch breaks so the following weekend, he took me to see it. He was so excited. He’d always wanted a leather couch and really liked the black. I discussed how I didn’t think leather was such a great idea in the humidity of HK and that I had visions of sliding right off it when the weather was so hot (neither of us are fans of excessive air conditioning use). And black was quite a depressing colour and given the size of this ensemble, it would suck all the light out of the room.

He clearly had his heart set on this couch.

I agreed to it because really, it’s only a couch.

And chair.

And he was sooooo happy to have one of his furniture goals realized.

That couch moved with us to three different places and I have to admit, it was very comfortable.

It also did suck the light out of the room and you could slide right off it when it was hot.

Fast forward eight years and there I was, single.

With a big black leather couch and chair that I never really liked. (There was quite a lot of other stuff too which was now suddenly mine rather than ours. That’s a post for another day).

I was about to move out of our last shared home to a smaller place so I asked a neighborhood couple if they would like it. They had seen it in our house repeatedly so knew what they were in for.

They jumped at the chance. I jumped at the chance. There was a lot of jumping going on.

It created a lot of space in the lounge and it all seemed so much brighter too.

Unbeknown to me at the time, that was the start of my downsizing journey.

 

 

Thanks to The Velvet Underground for the title to this post.