Home Is Where the Couch Is

“It looks just like our couch in Bosnia!” my mother exclaims, looking at the white sectional in front of us. She chuckles as she moves to another option, further down the aisle. I take a closer look. She’s right (of course she is). The couch I singled out as the only viable option in the ocean of gray-beige sameness we have been swimming in, store after store, days on end, is eerily similar to the one from my childhood.

My parents married young, and we lived with my grandparents while they built their careers and their bank accounts, enough to be able to buy their first apartment, the year my little brother was born. Once she finally had a home of her own, my mother decided to furnish the living room all in white. Everyone thought she was crazy. With two young kids, it was inevitable that couch would be dirty in no time, they proclaimed. But my mother was determined, and my father knew better than to interfere, and so, for years to come, and through many large kids’ parties and drunken adult shenanigans that took over once we kids sugar-crashed to bed, we all did our best to keep that couch, and all around it, as stain-free as possible.

My father, brother, and I, on the infamous white couch, the year we bought it

A handful of years later, a Serb general would knock on our door, point a gun at my father’s face, and tell him that this apartment was now his - “You have 5 minutes to get out, take nothing of value.” The rest of us had already fled the war and were living in that limbo that materializes when you lose everything overnight and are yet to fully accept it. My father stayed behind, trying to at least save some people from the war we, Bosnians, were losing big time. And so, on this random Tuesday at 8am, he was staring at a gun barrel and trying not to panic. He looked around this Home that held so many memories, and so much love, grabbed a few of our photo albums and a handful of random clothes (later realizing it was mismatched socks and old shirts), and stumbled out, hoping the man wouldn’t shoot him in the back.

A decade later, my father was the one knocking on that door, with my mother and me in tow, as well as a small camera crew. I was recording our post-war return to our hometown for my feature documentary Back to Bosnia. That same man who kicked my father out at gunpoint opened the door, let us into our own apartment (his family shuffling around us, failing to hide their scowls), and we all proceeded to politely smile our way through the most awkward reunion in the world. I was completely overwhelmed by so many conflicting emotions, and yet determined not to show this inner roller-coaster to these people who effectively stole my childhood, so I just sat there, silently sifting through the avalanche of memories it stirred in me.

That was the last time any of us saw that couch. A year later, when a judge ruled the Serb family had to return our home and everything in it to us, its rightful owners, they stripped it to its bones, taking all furniture, and even ripping out custom-fit kitchen cabinets and closets from the walls. An optimist in me wants to believe they kept it all and took it to their new home, but the realist knows they most likely dumped it at the nearest landfill, together with the rest of our pre-war life. As a punishment for us daring to ask for it back? Or as a way to erase their shame for stealing it? Either way, that couch, that apartment, and everything it ever represented to me were long gone.

And yet, here I was, at a Room & Board in a Florida strip mall, staring at this replica of my childhood’s family movie nights, and pillow fights with my brother, resurrected from my subconsciousness like a ghost. I hesitantly sat on this American version of it, half-hoping it would take away the pain that swelled up in me, unexpectedly, at my mother’s off-hand remark. I leaned into its soft pillows, trying to feel at home. But the couch was just a couch. No magical wand there.

The reason we were couch-shopping to begin with was Hurricane Helene, which flooded my parents’ house a month before. Just like the war before it, it came suddenly, unannounced, and destroyed everything in its path. This house was the second home that my mother worked hard and saved for years to buy. She had landed in Florida as a Bosnian War refugee back in 1994, with two underage kids (me, my brother), no money, no community to help her/us, most of our family (including my father) still stuck in Bosnia - dead or alive, we didn’t know. She also spoke no English, so her college degree was useless. But if my mother taught me anything, it is to keep my head high through life’s hardships, and to keep my eye on the prize, no matter what. For her, the prize was buying a Home to replace the one she loved and lost in Bosnia. And she did, against all odds, only a handful of years into this strange new life, proceeding to decorate it in just as memorable and awe-inspiring way as she did that first one. But hurricanes don’t care about any of that. Helene came, flooded, destroyed, and left us with a shell that we were now rebuilding into a Home yet again. It also swept away most of those photos my father took when he fled our Bosnian home. The last proof of our pre-war life - gone in the swell of the Atlantic Ocean.

“Oh my god, no!” I exclaim when she tells me, trying not to cry.

“I don’t know. Perhaps it’s better this way,” my mother shrugs. “It cleared the slate for us to fill our lives with new memories.” Reminding me that I was always the sentimental one between us. The poet, the artist, feeling everything (too?) deeply.

“At least Taki wasn’t swept up with them too,” I muse, referring to my brother’s ashes, which we keep in a box on top of a bookshelf, my mother refusing to part with him even though he’s been gone 15 years already. “Although, if you think about it, it would’ve been quite appropriate he ended up in a hurricane, given what a little Taz (Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil) he was when he was alive,” I add, chuckling.

My mother shakes her head, “Ah, as morbid as ever.” Adding, “No wonder you’re not married,” as if my sense of humor wasn’t one of my top attributes (says I). I smile, thinking of my brother, and knowing he would’ve laughed heartily.

A few weeks later, we find the perfect couch for our newly rebuilt home. It’s blue, the color of the deep sea, and my mother’s and brother’s eyes. My mother and I assemble it, and she giggles like a little girl when she sits on it for the first time.

My mother loving her new couch

“Third time’s the charm!” she announces, pointing out that even though we’re at the same address, the house and everything in it are brand new, and that makes it our third official Home. “May it last… a long time,” my father adds, knowing better by now than to say “forever”.

That night we order pizza, make popcorn, and settle into our new couch, for a family movie night, Florida edition. One new memory at the time.