Creative Nonfiction.
By Gregory Sheets
Gregory is a Creative Writing major at Onondaga Community College. He hails from Warners, New York, where he was raised on a dairy farm. He attributes this upbringing to influencing a focus on nature in his writings and an ability to describe the details of operations. Gregory has said that he draws inspiration from Walt Whitman because he “brought language to things I value and wrote with emotional generosity instead of irony or distance.” Gregory also has a knack for writing humor, which no doubt you’ll experience in this work. Without further ado, please enjoy The Scandinavian Labyrinth by Gregory Sheets.
I wasn’t alone. My husband—Trent, because he is the kind of person who can walk into a store and not be personally offended by it—sat in the passenger seat with his phone out, reading reviews like we were about to adopt a child instead of purchasing laminated particleboard.
“Do you want the tall one or the wide one?” Trent asked.
“I want the one that doesn’t collapse and reveal my whole personality,” I said.
He glanced at me the way he always does when I say something dramatic about furniture, which is to say: with the patient resignation of someone who has married into my inner weather system.
It was mid-winter, that stretch of the calendar when the world feels like it’s been left in the freezer too long. The sky was a dull, overcast lid. The trees looked like they’d given up. Even the sun, when it appeared, had the weak glow of a phone on 7% battery. We drove in silence for a while, the kind of silence that isn’t awkward because we’ve already paid our dues together. We have done the conversational small talk. We have graduated to the comfortable emptiness of a shared Spotify playlist and mutual exhaustion.
We passed the usual roadside landmarks: gas stations, chain restaurants, a billboard advertising a personal injury lawyer with the face of a man who looks like he has just sued joy itself. There was a banner that said LIVE YOUR BEST LIFE, which is a phrase I have always taken as a threat to my own paradigm.
Trent tapped his phone. “It says the store is busy.”
“It’s always busy,” I said. “It’s a feeding trough for people who think they can reinvent themselves with storage solutions.”
“Maybe it won’t be that bad.”
That was his optimism speaking, that bright, misguided animal. I don’t have optimism. I am a FER (functional expectations realist). I keep my hopes low so they can’t be mugged by the first pickpocket to come along.
Detour #1: The Adult Desire for Control
There’s a point in life—somewhere after you’ve realized your knees have an opinion and your back has a memory—when you begin to crave control in small ways. You cannot control politics, weather, time, gas prices or the fact that people chew loudly in public. But you can control the shape of your own living room. You can control whether your socks are in a drawer or floating around the house like tiny multicolored domestic ghosts.
This is why grown adults lose their minds over organization. We buy bins and baskets and labeling machines like we’re preparing for a government audit of our emotional stability. We create systems. We make rules. We put spices in alphabetical order, which is less about convenience and more about telling the universe: You won’t get me today.
IKEA is a temple for this kind of control. It sells you the fantasy that if you get the right shelf, the right wardrobe insert, the right set of matching hangers, you will become a person who wakes up early, drinks water, and has a clean conscience. It’s the American dream translated into Swedish and printed on flat cardstock tags.
The problem is: the fantasy never arrives. The shelf eventually arrives. The fantasy stays delayed in shipping.
Back to the plot: entering the machine
The parking lot was already full, and the cars moved through it with the slow hostility of a school pickup line. Everyone looked like they had something to prove. I circled twice, like a vulture with a driver’s license, before a soccer-mom’s minivan finally pulled out and I slid into the spot with the tense satisfaction of someone winning a minor war.
Staring at the boxy but cheery cobalt blue and canary yellow building, I gathered myself as if I were going on some secret mission.
Inside, the air changed. It always does. Outside air is normal air—weather, seasons…reality. IKEA air is controlled. Neutral. Timeless. IKEA air feels like it was designed by a committee of people who hate joy but respect efficiency. The smell of Swedish meatballs emanated this air, as did the smell of that particleboard and laminate.
We grabbed a cart. It had a wobbly wheel, of course. There is always one wheel that refuses to participate, like a rebellious teenager. The cart rattled along behind us, announcing our presence to strangers. Trent pushed it like he was steering a ship. I followed, already bracing myself for the first turn into the maze.
If you have never been to an IKEA, understand this: you do not enter an IKEA. You are processed by it. It is not a store as much as a narrative. It is a guided experience with black arrows on the floor, like a museum exhibit curated by someone with a grudge against straight lines.
You walk the path. You see the rooms. You are shown the lives you could have lived if your kitchen had better lighting and your friends wore neutral tones (which is rare with our friends). You are invited to sit on couches you didn’t ask for and to imagine yourself as a person who casually owns six matching wine glasses.
Trent and I stepped into the first showroom and immediately became two more bodies in the slow-moving herd. A couple in front of us argued about a side table as if their strained marriage depended on it.
“I like this one,” the woman said.
“This one looks cheap,” the man said.
“It’s IKEA. We’re in IKEA. Everything looks cheap.”
That was the most honest sentence spoken in the building all day.
Trent looked at a display labeled “Small Space Solutions,” which is a polite way of saying, “Here’s how to live in a box without admitting you live in a 235 square foot box”. He nodded like he was appreciating art.
“See,” he said. “This is smart.”
I stared at a bed tucked into a corner like it was highly classified government material. Above it, framed photos of smiling strangers. The room was staged to imply a life free of clutter, conflict, and spilled coffee. It was a lie, of course. Real life cannot be staged unless you are very wealthy or dead.
“This is propaganda,” I told him.
Trent gave the death stare. “You can’t let yourself enjoy anything.”
“That’s not true,” I said grinning. “I enjoy complaining.”
Detour #2: The Curse of the Showroom Life
The showroom is designed to gently shame you. It whispers, “Look how nice you could be.” It’s not aggressive shame, not the loud kind that makes you feel dirty. It’s the soft shame that makes you feel slightly behind, slightly inadequate, slightly late to your own adulthood.
You walk through model kitchens where every utensil has a perfect little home. You see a living room where no one has ever dropped a sock and forgotten it existed. You see a child’s bedroom that suggests a child who writes thank-you notes unprompted and never screams at 2 a.m. There are framed prints that say things like “HOME” and “GATHER,” as if the only thing standing between you and a functional household is a decorative sign instructing you to be functional.
It’s impossible not to compare. That’s the trap. Even if you know it’s fake—even if you understand that these rooms are curated like Instagram feeds—you still feel the tug. You still think, Maybe I could be that person. Maybe I could have matching blue-striped towels.
And if you’re like me, you immediately follow that thought with: And then I would still be myself, standing there with my coordinating towels, wondering why the towels didn’t fix the bigger mess.
Back to the plot: the mission begins to slip
We made it through bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, neatly organized home offices—each one a suggestion of a life we were supposedly failing to live—and I could feel the plan slipping. The bookshelf had become a distant concept, like retirement or inner peace.
Trent stopped in front of a display of lamps.
“We need better lighting,” he said.
“We need better coping skills,” I replied.
He held up a lamp shaped like a mushroom. “This would look nice in the den.”
“I don’t want a lamp that looks like it could drug or poison me.”
We moved on. The crowd thickened. A child cried loudly somewhere behind us, the sound bouncing off the ceiling like a warning. A man tried to navigate a cart carrying a rolled-up rug the size of a small submarine. A woman stared at a price tag as if it had betrayed her.
Then we reached the section where the route splits—kitchenware on one side, décor on the other—and I felt the old fear: getting separated, trapped, lost among the throw rugs like a person swallowed by softness.
Trent seemed calm. He always seems calm in places that make me feel like I’m being coerced toward a purchase. He thrives in environments with clear, pointer arrows. I, on the other hand, have a personal history with arrows. I don’t trust anything telling me where to go.
“Remember,” Trent said, “we’re here for a bookshelf.”
“We’re here to be humbled,” I said.
“No. A bookshelf.”
“Same thing.”
We finally arrived at the wall of bookshelves—tall, wide, skinny, with doors, without doors, with and without glass inserts, some named like Scandinavian superheroes. There it was: rows of potential shelves stacked neatly like dominoes, waiting for us to pick one out and become slightly different people.
Trent pointed. “That one.”
I looked at it. It was fine. It was aggressively fine. The kind of fine that tells you it will not bring you happiness but will also not collapse immediately, which is what we call “reliable” these days.
I checked the tag. The name was BILLY, which is IKEA’s most honest move: naming a bookshelf like a guy who sells used cars and knows too much about your finances. Does this Billy also have some weird proclivity with stockpiling books? I’ll never know.
“We’re buying Billy,” I said. “Of course we are.”
Trent nodded. “Billy’s a classic.”
“Billy is a compromise,” I said. “Billy is what happens when you accept that you’re never going to be the kind of person who owns a handcrafted oak bookcase.”
“I don’t want a handcrafted oak bookcase.”
“Exactly,” I said. “That’s adulthood. Not wanting things because wanting them seems exhausting.”
We located the aisle and bin number, wrote them down like explorers charting a dangerous land, and headed toward the warehouse. Normal, city-block-sized IKEA’s have a warehouse, you know.
Detour #3: The Myth of “One Simple Purchase”
Every errand starts with a lie. “I’m just grabbing one thing.” “This won’t take long.” “I’ll be in and out.”
These lies are small and necessary, like the lies you tell yourself about your future: I’ll start working out next week. I’ll e-mail that person back tomorrow. I’ll stop doomscrolling at night. The lie isn’t about deception. It’s about survival. If you told yourself the truth—that the errand will become a two-hour ordeal involving crowds, delays, and an existential reckoning in aisle 17—you would never leave the house. You would become a hermit with a reasonably controlled blood pressure.
IKEA knows this. It is designed to turn your one simple purchase into a relationship. It wants you to bond. It wants you to commit. It wants you to wander into “Kitchen Organization” and feel like a better person is waiting for you behind a set of tidy drawer dividers.
And you know what? Sometimes you want to believe it. Sometimes you want a neat little narrative: I went, I bought, I returned, I built, I became. A clean sequence of events, like a self-help book with a satisfying ending.
Real life is messier. Real life is you buying a bookshelf and then spending three hours assembling it while quietly questioning your intelligence and your worthiness to own an Allen wrench (hex key).
Back to the plot: the warehouse and the flat-pack prophecy
The warehouse is where the fantasy dies and the boxes begin. The lights are brighter, the ceilings higher, the mood more industrial. It’s like walking backstage at a theater and realizing the magic is just simple plywood structures.
We found the aisle. We found the slot. We found the Billy boxes stacked like coffins for dreams. Trent pulled one out with the steady confidence of someone who has done manual labor voluntarily.
I stared at the box.
“This is going to be a fight,” I said.
“It’s just assembling,” Trent said.
“That’s what people say before they start yelling at inanimate objects.”
We loaded the box onto the cart. It instantly made the cart harder to steer. The wobbly wheel took this as an opportunity to become even more dramatic; veering left like it had political opinions.
Now, if you’ve ever watched a couple shop together, you know the store becomes a stage for a particular kind of domestic theater. It’s not the big dramatic fights—those happen at home, later, over something unrelated like your “tone.” In the store, the fights are subtle. They are about pace and direction and whether you need to stop and look at an LED lamp.
We reached the marketplace section: the small stuff. The add-ons. The little temptations lined up like candy at a Wegman’s checkout line.
Trent picked up a pack of time-honored unscented, ecru-colored tealight candles. “These are useful.”
I picked up a set of walnut-colored wooden hangers. “These would make us look like we have our lives together.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Do we want to look like that?”
“Maybe just for guests,” I said.
We ended up buying neither, which felt like an act of moral strength, like me refusing a crème-filled donut in the nurses’ break room. But then: Trent spotted a pearl-gray throw blanket.
“It’s soft,” he said, already doomed.
I touched it. It was soft. It felt like a compromise between comfort and surrender.
“How much?” I asked.
He checked the tag.
It was cheap enough to make us feel sagacious. That’s how they get you.
We added it to the cart. The cart now held a bookshelf and a fluffy blanket, which is what my emotional life looks like too: a structure I pretend will help, plus a soft thing to cope when it doesn’t.
The checkout: where hope goes to pay
By the time we hit the self-checkout line, I was tired in a way that felt spiritual. There are different types of fatigue. There’s physical tired, like after exercise. There’s mental tired, like after dealing with a life-sapping 12-hour ICU shift. And then there’s IKEA tired, which is the drained emptiness of being exposed to a thousand versions of life you could live; realizing you still have to go home and be yourself.
The line moved slowly. We scanned the box, scanned the blanket, scanned our patience.
Trent paid. The receipt printed out like a small legal document confirming our consent to future frustration.
Outside, the cold air felt honest. It didn’t promise anything. It didn’t suggest a better life. It simply existed, like my baseline depressed mood.
We loaded the box into our truck with the ritual seriousness of people preparing for a job interview. It barely fit, because of course it barely fit. The universe prefers inconvenience.
He shut the tailgate. “Not so bad,” he said.
“Give it time,” I told him. “The real story starts when we meet the instructions.”
Detour #4: Instructions, Masculinity, and the Silent Rage of Assembly
Flat-pack furniture assembly is one of the last socially acceptable places for adults to have tantrums. It’s a sanctioned arena for quiet rage, a domestic coliseum where you wrestle with screws and wooden dowels and your own sense of self-competence.
Instructions are supposed to help. IKEA instructions, in particular, are famously wordless, as if language would only confuse you. Little cartoon hands point. Little nondescript cartoon people smile. No one in the pictures is sweating. No one is staring into the endless void. The instruction booklet suggests a world where everything fits the first time and your brain is not actively sabotaging you.
There’s a specific humiliation in not understanding instructions that were designed for the entire world to understand. If you mess up, it feels like failing a universal human test. Like being told, “Congratulations, you can’t build an uncomplicated rectangle.”
And it becomes personal. You start blaming the furniture. You start blaming the company. You start blaming your childhood. You start saying things like, “Why would they do it this way?” as if there is a moral philosophy behind the placement of screw C. 6. f.
Assembly turns you into a philosopher against your will. It forces you to confront questions like: What is the purpose of stability? and Why is the left side always harder? and At what point does an Allen wrench become a weapon?
Back to the plot: the build and the small victory
At home, we dragged the box inside like we were moving a body. Trent opened it carefully, as if it might explode. We spread the pieces across the floor: panels, shelves, multiple hardware packets that looked like they belonged in a physics lab.
Then we opened the instructions.
And there it was: the calm, smiling cartoon dude, holding a screw like a promise.
I sat down cross-legged, already suspicious. I sorted the hardware into little piles, which is my love language: order. His love language is not losing his mind, which is harder to demonstrate.
Step one went fine. Step two went fine. Step three required us to find a specific screw that looked identical to two other screws, and this is where the psychological warfare began.
Trent held up a screw. “Is this it?”
“They’re all it,” I said. “They’re all the same screw in different disguises.”
We argued lightly. We laughed once, the forced laugh of people trying to keep things from turning dark. We kept going, colorful language and all.
At some point, the bookshelf began to look like a bookshelf. That moment—when chaos turns into shape—is the closest thing to magic I trust. Not because it’s inspiring, but because it’s rare and tangible.
When we carefully stood it upright, it wobbled slightly, then settled, like it was deciding whether to cooperate. Trent pressed down gently on the top.
“It’s really sturdy,” he said.
I ran a hand along the edge. It felt smooth. It felt real. It felt like a structure I could rely on, which is what I crave more than I admit.
We slid books onto the shelves—novels, textbooks, and old notebooks filled with half-finished ideas—and I felt a small, quiet satisfaction. Not joy, not triumph, not the fireworks IKEA tries to sell you. Just the mild relief of something becoming what it was supposed to be.
Trent stepped back, hands on his hips. “See? We did it.”
I looked at the shelf, now holding the weight of our stories and our ambitions and our unread intentions.
“Yeah,” I said. “We built a rectangle.”
He nudged me with his shoulder. “You okay?”
I wanted to say something profound. I wanted to say the shelf made me feel stable. I wanted to say the act of assembling something with another person made me feel less alone. I wanted to say that sometimes the only way I can access emotion is through tasks—through doing, through building, through the physical proof that my hands can make order from the chaos.
Instead, I said the truth in the only way I know how.
“I’m fine,” I told him. “I’m just… moderately less annoyed.”
Trent grinned like he understood that this was my version of happiness. And maybe it was.
Not a transformation. Not a new life. Not a showroom fantasy.
Just a bookshelf, standing there, doing its job.
And me, standing beside it, still myself—just slightly better, stored.
thecentralnewyorker.com 