A Coffee Table Piece
My Cat Photobombing My Coffee Table Picture
This post was originally published January 18, 2024.
What is the point of a coffee table, if not to amount clutter?
Growing up, my family never had a coffee table. I’m not sure why. Perhaps to leave more space on the living room floor for my dogs to laze about. I would put my water, my tea, my juice on the floor, and every now and again, knock it over. When I moved out on my own, the first piece of furniture I bought was a coffee table.
For the first few days, it served as my bedside table, as I slept on my couch, waiting for my bed to arrive. Then for the next month it was my work desk, as I painstakingly searched for the perfect desk to fit my intended aesthetic. It was always a temporary, transient space. I bought the table for $30 at Walmart with the intent to replace it. Now four years later, it sits in the exact same place.
I think the contents of a coffee table can say a lot about a person. Mine holds many things. Things that need to be put away. Things that I don’t have a home for. Things I need to do, but not today or tomorrow. Throughout the years it’s held hopes for who I might be. A cookbook that I’ve never made a single thing from. American Sign Language flashcards, which I’ve never opened. Plants holding onto their last breath and torn out notebook paper for stories I’ve struggled to love.
But it also holds the reality of who I am. Books with hundreds of sticky notes poking out of it. Tea and hot chocolate in the winter. My laptop as it plays the latest episode of Taskmaster or blinds me with the blank document of a blog post I’m about to write. As I sit on the couch, eating from a box of Cheez-Its, my cat will come sit on my coffee table and cry until I give her one.
I’m a busy person, and things come and go from the coffee table as frequently as I come and go from my couch, but for a space that’s designed to exist in the center of living, there’s a lot to be learned from what gets left behind.
What does your coffee table say about you?