Home is the place that has changed the most this year.
With the absence of outside, inside has swelled to accommodate every sphere of life. Each inert room has become its own theater of living. If you're lucky, the kitchen is for recreation. The spare room is a bar you can pretend to share with far-off friends. The living room is a restaurant, a cubicle, a movie theater, a therapist's office. The needle of work pierces everything. There is no line between labor and play, between apartment and world, and maybe that's why we're all so goddamn tired all the time.
In July, we'd had enough. In August, we moved somewhere new, driven by want of a different inside-outside. We underwent all the rituals of moving, but upside-down and backwards. For instance: it took 30 minutes to get in the door at Ikea, and they weren't even serving meatballs. In every little bedroom diorama, we had to dance around other shoppers in a game of keep-away. If Ikea is normally a circus, this time it was a scavenger hunt combined with dodgeball, plus a zombie apocalypse.
By the time we got to the end, where the lines to check out were no shorter than the ones to get in, we were worn out and stinking of hand sanitizer. It took 20 minutes to get a hot dog. How else to explain why we bought the Ikea beer?
Yes: there is an Ikea beer. Two, actually. It was news to me, too, but there at the register was Öl Ljus (a Pale Lager) and Öl Mörk (a Dark Lager), both featuring the blue-and-yellow Ikea logo and that goofy, sans-serif font that seems designed to placate you, to convince you that this is fun, after all—isn’t this an adventure? I found out later that both are brewed by Krönleins Brewery in Halmstad, Sweden. I picked up the bottle of Öl Mörk and read the description: “A reddish-brown dark lager with a malty, rich and creamy taste with notes of roasted coffee.” Fuck it, I thought. There was space enough in the blue bags for a few bottles.
What did they taste like? We drank them while painting the kitchen and putting up shelves and tripping over boxes and occasionally bickering over where the bowls should go. Roasty, I guess? They sat in our beer fridge like a visual gag, but jokes don’t taste like much. Like Ikea meatballs, or like anything you buy in a flush of enthusiasm on vacation and later regret—that bottle of pastis, that box of Turkish delights—they were flat and underwhelming outside of their original context.
Maybe we should have opened them right on the showroom floor. We could have hopped from living room to office to bedroom, beer in hand, trying out all those different insides, secure in the knowledge that we could always keep moving. We would have never had to drink on the same sofa twice.
