“Nest” by Mia Avramut, wax on clayboard, 6 x 6 in.

It was right around my college graduation day that the snake came. I wasn’t home to witness any of what happened. I was in Chicago, selling everything in my college apartment and using the cash to go out drinking. It was hot, and my days of packing produced a sticky feeling of discomfort that would come back like bile minutes after stepping out of a cold shower.

I had been following what was happening at home because my dad liked to write me about it most days. I imagined him typing out his emails to me in his study, around 8:00, right after the sun had gone down and his beer had leaked language into the happy peacefulness of his mind. He was elated, these days, to spend each evening after dinner out on the porch. He and my mom had recently renovated it. They bought new, comfy furniture– the familiar rusted chairs with mildewed cushions were gone. My mom hung potted flowers all around the porch ceiling, and somehow convinced ivy to grow along the beams. At the edge of the porch, as if to mark off this magical space, they strung white Christmas lights and windchimes.

Because of all this beauty, a California wren had ventured into our backyard to nest in one of the hanging porch baskets. Among my mom’s peonies, she laid her eggs. California wrens are small and fat. Their color is a humble light brown, and when they look at you with their inscrutable bird eyes you see dignity in the streak of white, eyebrow-like, on the sides of their heads. In the summers, you hear them everywhere. They sing often, and with impressive range.

June in Chicago, the sounds outside were of cars pulling up outside of soon-to-be-abandoned college homes, the growl of suitcases along sidewalks, and the smugly triumphant shrieks of day-drunk seniors. I was impatient and sloppy in packing all my stuff into boxes. I threw wine glasses in with leftover boxes of pasta and didn’t fold my clothes or even turn them right-side-out before stuffing them into duffel bags. It was hugely satisfying to see my cluttered room turn clean and empty. A guy bought my desk for $50, and I used half the money for a cheeseburger and beers at the campus pub with my friends. We talked about our plans for the summer and what we thought we might do after that, and didn’t think of how easy it was to take for granted that we would always get drunk together.

The next morning, while I dozed sweaty and headachy, my dad sent me an email about how the wren’s eggs had finally hatched. When he went out on the porch with his coffee, he heard a chorus of little squawks in brand new voices. He wanted to look at the eggshells, now empty and useless, but he didn’t want to disturb the babies. The mother wren was so excited, he wrote. She flitted back and forth, chirping at her babies with a new, joyful song he hadn’t heard before. He was proud that she had gotten so used to him that she let him listen in on their celebration.

Goodbyes came in stages: I can’t believe this is the last time we’ll eat here, the last time we’ll drink together on campus, the last week we’ll be living in Chicago, etc. They did not seem real except for one. I’d had a falling out with my oldest friend. First year, we used to laugh so hard on the floor of her dorm room that beer dribbled out the corners of our mouths. Now, we stood braced against separate walls and I told her I hoped she enjoyed Oxford. “Thanks,” she said. “Maybe next year when I come back, we can…start over, and see how it goes.” The cause of the falling out was a mutual feeling of abandonment, not worth describing, which day to day seems irrelevant but builds and builds.

The next day there was no email. My dad called me instead, while I was lying on my bed doing nothing, with the fan on. He said that when he had come outside for his beer, he had found the California wren jumping from spot to spot but never landing in her potted plant. She was calling out sharply. He could hear a commotion from the unseen baby birds, and it was a sound he had not heard from them before. When he looked in the basket, seeing the chicks’ soft brown feathers for the first time, he also saw a snake. It was curled lazily around two of the baby birds, the third a lump in its stomach. He picked up the snake and flung it by its tail into the yard. It hit the ground with the thump of a thing already in motion. Then my dad went to the shed and got the hatchet that he used to weed kudzu out of the garden. As the snake slithered away he brought the blade down hard. At the age of 62, he killed his first living being. While he stared at the two pieces at his feet, the wrens cried.

But–two babies still remaining under the safe white lights.

My bed was the only piece of furniture remaining in my room at that point. I couldn’t sell it, because a couple of the slats were broken from a drunken and overly aggressive hookup with someone I did not know well or much like. I was just going to throw the bed in the alley, after my last night in the blank white room. Graduation was a day away. When I hung up the phone with my dad, picturing the events that had led up to him standing there over the dead snake and baby bird, I felt fear swallow me. Cliches ring true because we seek them out, match them up to the experiences that would otherwise bewilder us. They become signs, omens as bright as Easter eggs.

 Heidi Siegrist is currently trying to make it/fake it in Chicago. She is also an MFA student at the University of the South, and is working on a collection of essays about entanglement (whatever that is).

“Dusk” by Mia Avramut, wax on paper, 5.8 x 8.2 in.

Jon’s apartment is the top floor of a four-level brownstone in an aging beauty queen of a neighborhood in the heart of Washington DC. The kitchen, living room, and the small glass table in the bay window that makes up the dining area are all one space, filled with odds and ends that mostly only make sense to Jon: photos in mismatched picture frames, Argentinian love masks, decorative candlesticks, an oversized poster of a 1950s Spanish motorcycle festival, and a small flock of tourist-shop Buddhas sitting happily in scattered locations. The tiny coffee table is littered with the wanderings of a mind that can’t make itself up: a biography of Bill Belichick, Gibran’s The Prophet, Shape magazine (“for the exercises”), a reference manual on management techniques, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, and endless notes to self. And in the middle of it all is a small L-shaped sofa.

The sofa is actually the Blake combination love seat and chaise from West Elm, a swanky furniture store for yuppies who’ve outgrown IKEA. The love seat can sit no more than two side by side without getting intimate—it is after all a love seat—but there’s room for another on the chaise next to it. Technically the chaise is a “fainting couch,” because it has a back and an arm, but West Elm’s customers are would-be-metrosexuals like Jon, not the heavily corseted ladies of Victorian times, so it’s a chaise. It’s hard not to want to faint into it, however. The flow of the room, the giant welcoming down-filled pillow behind you and the long expanse of the chaise coaxes even the most excited of guests to lie down and take a moment.

This particular West Elm combination is putty gray in color, with chocolate-colored legs, and a slightly rough, though not uncomfortable “basketweave” finish. In all honesty, it seems a pretty ordinary sofa, until you sit on it. Only then do you realize how ridiculously comfortable it is. Not in that cheap Swedish way that feels right only in one position and only in the showroom, nor in the overgenerous softness of a reclining, swiveling, drink-holding, faux suede All-American sofa. The Blake is firm, yet giving, and feels snug whether you sit upright or lounge haphazardly. It’s nothing less than a favorite lover wrapping arms around you and whispering stay awhile.

More often than not the love seat becomes the guest’s, while Jon and his partner JJ stretch out on the chaise together, her head falling to his chest, sometimes in sleep. Conversations between friends will continue on in to the night, and become increasingly dream-like. When eventually the stories and half-awake debates have ended and sleep is taking everyone together, the couple departs wordlessly, and the guest is left with the whole sofa to stretch out on.

As comfortable as the West Elm is to sit on, it is literally a dream to sleep on. It’s wide enough to roll from side to side without the gymnastics of most sofas, and it’s thick, firm padding would shut any princess up about a pea. This is the city, so there’s no true dark and no true silence. But the street light, which stands mercifully below the window, scans patterns through the treetop onto the old plaster ceiling above that are the envy of any child’s mobile, and with the window open, the distant sirens, car horns, and shouts are as reassuring as any summer’s breeze. To sleep here is to sleep like you’ve never slept before.

The record for residence on the West Elm is nine months, held by my friend Zach. After wandering around the world—fighting wildfires, acting in a “ghost town,” working as a carpenter—Zach came out of the blue to stay with Jon. He had no job, no money, and nowhere to go, though that did not seem to be a huge point of concern for either man. At one point, Jon found Zach a job painting the walls of a nearby dive pizza joint. The owner told him he could paint what he wanted. He meant white or cream. Zach instead painted a mural that took three months to complete. When he was done he refused any payment except the original fifty bucks he’d been promised. Later he was asked to fix a shelf by one of Jon’s friends who’d heard Zach was a carpenter. Zach created a small library of built-in bookshelves, and this time refused payment of any kind because it was for a friend of Jon’s.

When Zach finally moved on, his record remained. Despite many guests—family visits, travelers passing through, friends in need—his record stood for years until Sherpa arrived for “two or three days, a week at most.” Sherpa is Taiwanese not Tibetan and has never climbed any mountain, but he’d been given the name the first time we met him, the way boys do, and kept it forever. He followed a stellar college career with a high-paying Capitol Hill job, which he parlayed into entrepreneurial success, buying three townhouses in a rundown DC neighborhood that gentrified overnight and quintupled in value. For years he was the successful one while the rest of us were still finding our way. Then he fell in love with the wrong girl and his life imploded. Within a year he was heartbroken, bankrupt, and homeless, his properties having been signed over to her in a final futile act of defiant love.

At first Sherpa was concerned with being the perfect guest. He’d lost his high-paying job, but found work stocking shelves, and he’d steal steak and bottles of wine and cook dinner for his hosts as a way to thank them. He’d make sure to regularly go out for long walks to give the couple some time to themselves. But as the weeks wore on, formality gave way to familiarity. By month two, anyone walking into the apartment was less likely to find him cooking and more likely to find him in his underwear studiously working his way through a 24-pack of PBR. He stopped going out for walks and told Jon to “fuck whenever you want, it doesn’t bother me.”

By the time nine months had passed, Sherpa had gotten his life back to a semblance of together and was ready to move on. But he stayed anyway, joking that he needed to break Zach’s record. Every evening Jon would come home from work and yell, “Still here?” in mock outrage, but, in truth, Sherpa had become both sidekick and mission, and he was happy for him to stay. It was ten months before Sherpa went on his way.

When it was I who was lost, and my turn to take the West Elm sofa came, I thought of its previous occupants and where they had gone after their respite with Jon. Zach wandered for years until finally he fell in love, married, joined the Rangers, traveled to Afghanistan—where he said he’d never felt more alive or satisfied with his life—and died in a firefight at age 31. Sherpa wandered too. He packed everything he owned in a tarpaulin sheet and traveled to Argentina, studying for a month in Buenos Aries before setting off on foot across the Patagonian Mountains. I heard from him next in Paris, living in a room as big as a closet in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, and sharing a corridor bathroom with a continually passed-out drunk. From Paris he walked for months on El Camino de Santiago—the old pilgrimage route to Galicia, Spain, to visit the remains of the apostle James in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. He’d Facebook from the churches he stayed in along the way, surrounded by other glorious lost souls, as happy as I’d ever seen him.

I stayed three weeks with Jon, receiving his blunt, good-natured counsel every evening, and soaking up the West Elm’s restorative powers every night. Then I followed Zach and Sherpa back into the world. Both had come back to Jon’s sofa for far shorter stays at various moments over the years, as have I. It is the haven we have all shared. Other sofas are a place to crash. The West Elm is for those uncertain times when you don’t know where the next step will take you. Watching the lives of my friends spin off from here, even if tragically as in Zach’s case, is always heartening, because I know a similar road lies open for me.

When Zach died, Sherpa and I returned to travel with Jon to the funeral in Cape Cod. That night, we drank heavily and happily, and told endless stories of Zach. When Jon finally took his leave, Sherpa and I were left alone on the West Elm in the awkward silence of an unspoken question. Who sleeps where? After a few moments, I took the guest’s love seat, and left him the chaise. He was the record-holder after all.

David Alasdair earned an MFA from Eastern Washington University in Spokane, WA, has seen the Loch Ness Monster, been in the world’s longest chorus line, and occasionally makes Shrek-like noises with his right ear.

Read an interview with David here.