How Ikea Cursed Me With Leukophobia

We were young. We were naive. We were taken in by the smell of Swedish meatballs.

My husband and I had just bought our first house. I owned a couch that I'd bought off an ex-boyfriend (which I'm not even sure was really his). My husband hated it. He, of course, owned a circular saw and a mini-fridge - neither of which were going in the living room if I had anything to say about it. And that explains how we found ourselves surrounded by Scandinavian furniture. We went from one fake living room setup to the next, oohing and aahing at the use of color and patterns. And then we saw it. The "Stylish Haven" that just had to be ours.

This is from a website (thus the giant price tag). I didn't actually take a picture of the fake living room setup in Ikea.

Before you can say Karlstad, we had our brand new couch strapped to the top of our Jeep Cherokee, happily burning through an insane amount of gas to get our new treasure home.

That was four years and two slipcovers ago. Today I awoke from a dream in which my couch had somehow lit itself on fire and was screaming, "you did this to me!" while my husband held my baby who pointed at me and smiled menacingly.

According to the Internets, I now have Leukophobia. And I'll tell you why...