Whoever is on sofa duty at the end of the night is expected to fold the throw. Nobody assigned this. It just became true, the way a lot of things in a shared house become true, and now there is one complaint that gets made on a loop, which is that everyone else treats the throw like a fitted sheet fight they’ve already lost, wadded into a corner of the sofa arm at a shape and density that suggests it was thrown, not folded, possibly from across the room.
The corner thing is real though, separate from the folding grudge. A cotton throw has four corners and by winter you can only ever locate two of them. The other two are inside the throw somewhere, having a private meeting, and you find out where they went at 11pm when you shake the whole thing out and a sock falls out that has not been seen since August.
We own too many of these. That’s not a confession, it’s inventory.
Cream one that was meant for the armchair and now lives permanently on the dog. A waffle weave one that looked expensive online and looks, in person, exactly as expensive as it was, which was not very. A chunky knit one somebody bought convinced it would be “the good one” and it has been demoted to car boot duty within four months, which nobody wants to talk about.
The cover question comes up constantly, as in, do you throw it over the existing sofa cushions or use it to hide the fact that the existing sofa cushions have opinions of their own about structural integrity. Both are valid. One of us uses hers exclusively to disguise a stain shaped like Portugal. It works. Until guests move it looking for a spot to sit and the whole strategy collapses in real time.
What we actually want, every single time, without exception, is enough weight that the thing stays where you put it. Too light and it’s just a large napkin, sliding off the sofa arm every time someone breathes near it. Too thick and it becomes a duvet you now have to explain to guests, and also it never fully dries after a wash, which is its own kind of betrayal.
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Washing frequency is a subject nobody in the group wants to answer honestly. We’re just going to leave that there.
The constant shuffling, though, that’s the real relationship.
Off the sofa to the actual bed because it’s cold. Back to the sofa because someone’s watching something and needs to be a burrito for two hours. Into the wash. Onto the dog. Back, slightly changed, slightly more dog, onto the sofa again. It never lands anywhere for good. That is apparently the whole job.
The complaint stands, by the way. Someone is folding that thing tonight and it is not going to be the same person again.
