After spending a full calendar year watching every TV show released by a streaming network while refreshing the news on her laptop, newly vaccinated woman Lauren Shipley is now emotionally grappling with the thought of leaving her couch.
“This dent in the couch started forming around last May,” said a tearful Shipley, “It was around when I got Disney+, that was huge for me. Sometimes I didn’t leave the couch for days.”
Shipley first started the quarantine like everyone else, baking in the kitchen, joining Zoom happy hours, and even exercising. But around May when the reality of everything set in, Shipley channeled her existential dread and disillusionment with society by watching every available form of entertainment a network had to offer.
“I thought I was someone with taste, you know? I thought I liked action movies and funny cartoons but turns out I’ll watch pretty much everything. I even watched Emily in Paris. Twice. Why did I do that?”
The dent on her couch really started exhibiting it’s current concave shape when Shipley began also taking meetings and calls there.
“At first it was one Hinge date and one work call. Before long, I was just in a bathrobe with my camera off for my nephew’s Zoom baptism. I also gave a killer speech for my friend’s Zoom dog funeral. Sometimes I think the dent was the reason I was able to do those things. It was my Gandalf, my Dumbledore.”
Shipley remarked that at one point a friend had tried to sit in her seat and she had become so territorial that she pretended to lose her sense of smell in order to get her to leave.
As the world reopens, Shipley is realizing that she must part with the thing she loves most.
“It feels like leaving my mother’s womb all over again,” Said Shipley between tears. “I know our time together is ending, but I don’t know how to say goodbye.”
But after seeing a slate of pandemic-related TV content being announced, Shipley decided that she’d rather leave her comfort zone than be subjected to shows about the pandemic she literally just went through.
“It’s gonna be hard out there,” Said Shipley, “But there’ll be plenty more opportunities for me to put another dent in a couch someday. I can only hope.”
