Look: I wanted to leave this whole couch thing behind me, to be honest, allowing bygones to be bygones and doing my best to make amends with the people of the Internet once my bitterness subsided. But For The Win‘s dutiful editors requested I write about the couch and my quixotic efforts to give it away, and I am a responsible employee of this website, so I will now revisit that existential quest here for the sake of the very Internet that jilted me so.

The couch in the photo above belonged to me from sometime in the summer of 2009 until a few hours ago. My wife and I bought it on sale at Macy’s when we were first married and living in the suburbs with a living room big enough to harbor a couch with broad armrests and a deep, comfortable profile. My wife was still in school when we moved back to New York City five years ago, so we brought the couch with us even though it was clearly too big for our new and tiny apartment because we just weren’t in a position to be purchasing new couches.

For the past couple of years, we have endured the nightmarish search for a better apartment in this same city. As it turns out, people who are not outlandishly wealthy are not permitted to purchase their own homes in Manhattan, no matter how tiny and no matter what neighborhood, because some rich jackass will just always come along and beat your reasonable bid on a cramped little apartment with an above-ask all-cash offer. My understanding is that it’s foreign billionaires looking for safe investments in which to hide their money from their governments, and that the apartments I would very much like to live in will instead sit empty. Maybe it’s like this elsewhere, too, but the whole New York City real-estate game is either a total sham or Marxism’s greatest guerrilla marketing campaign. It’s depressing. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

I’m going to get to the couch, don’t worry.

Just before we left for vacation a couple weeks ago, we found out that the first floor apartment in the building next to ours had opened up. It’s the same (refreshingly excellent) landlord and a nearly identical apartment, but it has a backyard and it’s not a fourth-floor walk-up like our old place. So we asked the landlord if we could have it, and while on the West Coast and far from all the stuff we would need to pack and move, we found out we could.

We’re in our mid-30s now and full-blown adults, which is messed up and scary and not something I’m terribly happy about. But it is, I think, for that reason my wife decided we should have a new couch that better fits our apartment. Buying a couch was very easy and I will skip that part entirely. The new couch will likely arrive to our apartment shortly after I am finished writing this post. All of this is going down right now. The excitement, you must realize, is palpable.

(USA TODAY Sports)

Anyway, the point is that we had very little time between getting back from vacation and moving into the new place, and we did not spend enough of it lining up some way to get rid of our old couch. But it’s a fine couch! I mean, look at it. It’s red and it’s comfortable and it’s mostly clean. Someone must want this couch, right?

I figured someone might actually be willing to give us money for this couch, which would help defray the cost of the new, better, thinner-profiled couch that will soon show up at my door. So I wrote a Craigslist ad, listing the couch for $300 or best offer and describing it as follows:

Have you ever dreamed of owning your own red couch? Dream no longer, craiglist, for I have a red couch available for sale for $300 or best offer. Just a touch over 7′ long and 3′ deep, this red couch will make the perfect place for you and up to two friends or acquaintances to sit comfortably while you watch TV or play board games or converse or do anything else you might think to do while sitting on a couch.

Crickets. To date, I have heard nothing from anyone about purchasing the couch, though I now have reason to suspect some of the fault my lay at the hands of Craiglist — the ever-sketchy classified-ad site that will soon become the obvious villain in this story. I tried emailing myself through my own Craigslist ad and still have not gotten notice. If you tried in earnest to contact me on Craigslist about buying my couch, I apologize. I never heard about it.

But at the same time, I also tried selling or giving or lending the couch to just about everyone I knew. My neighbor didn’t want the couch because he said he had one just like it. My parents admitted they could kind of use a couch, but they had no way of getting this couch back to their house. A couple of my co-workers who live near me said they already have couches. Couches this nice, though? I bet not! I thought they might be reasonable enough to recognize a great deal on a fine couch, but I was wrong. No one I knew of wanted this couch, even though it is a couch once owned by me, noted sports blogger and Internet personality Ted Berg.

We looked into donating the couch to various worthy charities, and even a few unworthy ones. But practically all of them need more than a week’s notice to schedule a pickup, and we did not have that type of time, because we knew the presence of the new couch would make removing the old couch impossible.

Yesterday, with the old couch taking up too much space in my new apartment and the new couch set for arrival today, I became desperate. I posted another Craiglist ad, this time offering up the couch for free to anyone willing to come take it from my apartment. Titled, “Free couch because you ingrates wouldn’t pay for it,” the post read as follows:

This gorgeous, comfortable, gently used red couch is so nice I thought I might find someone shrewd enough to purchase it from me for a totally reasonable price, but you ingrates did not bite. So I’m going to be real with you, craiglist: I need to get rid of this couch fast, and I’d sleep a whole lot easier knowing that my beloved red couch has a loving family.

I could leave it on the street tomorrow morning, but then people will assume it has bedbugs and dogs will urinate on this couch. This couch is in fact 100% bedbug and urine free! It’s about 7′ long and 3′ deep. It is a good couch and I want to give it to you. All you need to do is come take it from me at my apartment on the Upper East Side tonight or sometime tomorrow morning.

Do you hear that, craiglist? I’m talking about a free couch here. No strings attached. You don’t even have to make idle chitchat with me upon picking up the couch; I don’t really care what you have to say and I trust you don’t care what I have to say, either. Bottom line is that I’m a guy with a red couch he needs to get out of his apartment and you’re a guy with an apartment that lacks a red couch, and it’s only reasonable that we work something out.

Contact me ASAP, or look for a sad, lonely red couch left out on the street somewhere on the Upper East Side tomorrow. Please don’t let it come to that.

I also bombarded Twitter and Facebook to offer up my couch, but somehow, no one seemed interested. It makes no sense to me, still. These entitled millennials, am I right!? This is a great couch! A couch like this deserves a good home. I watched so much TV from this couch, and share with it fond memories of watching various TV shows and sporting events.

This morning, I woke up and swiftly and hopefully opened my email under the assumption that, even in a landscape as bizarre and deranged as the contemporary Internet, there must be someone out there shrewd enough to want a comfortable, handsome and free couch, no less one that will inevitably someday become a collector’s item for its association with me.

Instead, I found only one email from Craigslist stating that my post had been flagged and removed for violating Craiglist’s terms of service. Are you serious right now, Craigslist? Have you ever, you know, visited Craigslist? People offer up all sorts of vile and depraved services there on the regular. I’d link some, but this is a family website, so you’ll just have to click around yourself or trust me that there are some seriously haunting ads there. And here I’m just a guy trying to give away a couch and you’re saying I can’t. Ridiculous. Patently absurd. And I read Craigslist’s terms of service, and can find no term that I clearly violated.

Finally, I found a note on the website of a nearby non-profit thrift store that said it accepted walk-in furniture donations. I will not mention the name of said thrift store here because I believe it is a well-meaning enterprise and one I do not want to denigrate. But after my wife and I hauled the couch out of our apartment, down the block and around the corner to that store this morning, we were told that they did not accept walk-in furniture donations. The woman at the register pointed us to the store’s website, but when we told her it was that very website that told us the store would accept our donation, she insisted that their policy had changed. She was kind of a jerk about it, too, to be honest.

I cannot say what happened next because I am pretty sure it was not legal. But we did rid ourselves of the couch, and I have good reason to believe someone else is now in possession of that couch. I hope he or she enjoys sitting on it, and acknowledges its comfort and its redness. I’d like to send out a sincere thanks to that person, whoever he or she may be, for easing the anxiety I felt over the prospect of a good couch unappreciated.

But no thanks to you, people of the Internet. I wanted to give you my couch, but you did not deserve it. Now I have a baller-ass new couch, upon which I will soon watch TV, and you will never come sit on it as long as we both shall live. Unless, of course, I move again sometime and need to sell it. In that case, please consider purchasing my couch in the future.