My Ikea Desk

This desk, purchased when Ikea entered the shores of the Bay Area in Emeryville, when I was a sophomore in college, came to inhabit my first apartment in Berkeley. Tucked against the wall. It endured the fat self-built desktop computer and CRT monitor where I crafted blog posts on scribble, early version of wordpress (aka b2) and browsed the-protagonist forums. It witnessed how I pissed off people and vice versa. It was the DJ table when we decided to have a house party as a retaliation to our downstairs neighbor for being noisy. (Result: it was a bust. as in, it wasn’t really a party at all.) It went to my second apartment in Berkeley, located on the southside, where I spent nights tearing up over a conversation that were simply words on the screen and observed me slack all those two years. It witnessed me preparing my graduate school applications.

Then it sat in my parents’ garage for two years until I returned to the Bay Area.

Then I took it with me to San Francisco to my first apartment. As in the first and only apartment. And here it sits in the corner of the room, perfectly sized for it and a laundry. The wood panels are composite and obviously weak. One of the shelves is in my closet, where it has been for the last 10 years. It is still as messy as when I first had it. Random bowls, random pens, random everything strewn around. It endured a LCD monitor, then decreased to only a laptop sitting on its stand next to a keyboard. The blinds look open it where occasionally pigeons flap their wings and squawk outside the window. But it has paid witness to more than half of my life. Well…almost. I have only used it for approximately 13 years.

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