The College Park IKEA on a Saturday is a zoo. Families fanning out into fake living rooms. Couples testing mattresses, sitting on the edge and bouncing slightly, looking at each other like: this one? Singletons pondering whether the couch they love can fit through their tiny DC row house door.

My mission? Find something to save my closet from its current cobbled together mess. I wasn’t quite sure exactly what I was looking for, but I figured a Saturday stroll through the blue behemoth would provide the inspiration required.

So, I wove through the maze. Past the kitchen vignettes, the KALLAX shelves, the BILLY bookcases. Past a dad attaching one of those big blue bags to the back of a shopping cart while his toddler tried to climb out of the seat. Past a couple having a quiet, intense conversation about drawer depth. Past a woman holding up two different lamp shades, turning each one in the light.

(Subscribe on Substack to receive The Luminist in your inbox every Saturday — an invitation to notice reality, rather than the stories our minds and culture like to spin.)

There’s a particular way humans move through IKEA. Hopeful. Measured. Imagining themselves into rooms and futures that don’t yet exist.

That couple discussing the dresser is not actually discussing the dresser. They’re negotiating a shared future. Will this fit? Will we fit? The man is picturing his clothes in those drawers. The woman is wondering if her mirror, passed down from her mother, will sit nicely on top. They’re building something together, right there at the maze’s right turn between bedrooms and office furniture.

The 20-something with the measuring tape and the determined expression is furnishing her first apartment, checking her budget’s ability to absorb that couch, picturing future naps sprawled across it, covered by a knitted-with-love blanket her grandma made.

The family with the two kids and the overloaded cart are mid-chapter. Picture frames. Curtains. A drawing easel. They’re not just buying things. They’re building the backdrop for a childhood that will feel, to those kids, like it was always there. Permanent. Inevitable. They won’t remember the IKEA trip. They’ll just remember the easel, covered in butcher paper and smears of crayon.

When at last I arrived in the closet section, I ran my hand along the PAX storage units, touching the hanging prop button-downs and carefully hung khakis. Then I felt myself drift, like a happy version of Ebenezer Scrooge, back to my IKEA’s past.

Me at twenty-two, loading cheap end tables into my gold Honda Accord for my move to Virginia, and the rented basement room I would live in until I could afford an apartment of my own.

Me at twenty-six, eyeballing a desk that I would sit at for the next two years, working on case studies, preparing for interviews, planting the seeds at business school for future C-suite Sue.

Me at twenty-eight, post-MBA, flush with a signing bonus, graduating from particle board to a white oak dining table I thought made me look like a real grownup.

Me at forty-three, pushing a cart with Mike while the kids lobbied for what they wanted: a beanbag chair, a weird lamp, those little wooden train sets. Mike on task with his yellow-legal-pad list. Me waiting for my Swedish meatball reward at the end.

Me at fifty-one, picking out cabinetry for the mudroom of a house I was building as my haven.

Me at fifty-three, listening to Kendall curse from her bedroom as she assembled her new platform bed.

And me last month, when Connor texted a photo of himself at the Denver IKEA, loading a bed frame into the back of his truck.

A buzz from the phone in my hand broke my reverie. I looked down and read Kendall’s text “What the heck are you doing at IKEA?”

But I couldn’t really say. It was no longer about closet inspiration. It was about me. All the past versions of me. All those carts, all those Allen wrenches, all those inscrutable directions cast aside. All those shelves, cabinets, tables, toys, all those visions come to life in the rooms of my apartments and my homes over the decades.

I took a few pictures of PAX wardrobe configurations, holding the display tags for a close up view. Then I walked back through the marketplace, past the candles and the dish towels and the inexplicable stuffed sharks, and out into the cold.

I drove through the obstacle course that is the IKEA parking lot, and back home. In the mudroom, I took off my winter boots and slid on my slippers, then hung my jacket in my white SEKTION cabinets, living fully in the real life I had once only imagined while strolling the IKEA maze all those years ago.

To assembling a life,

Sue

Subscribe on Substack to receive The Luminist in your inbox every Saturday — an invitation to notice reality, rather than the stories our minds and culture like to spin.

Get full access to The Luminist at theluminist.substack.com/subscribe