Paula Harris, whose poem “the devil is sitting in my living room crying” appears in SRPR Issue 46.1, talks heartbreak and the devil sitting on your couch.

I was sitting on the couch at my best friend’s. I was staying the night, sleeping on his couch. Mike didn’t like the term best friend because he used to have a counsellor who had been through a messy divorce and the counsellor said it was too childish, to call someone your best friend, so I always called Mike my closest friend, but really… best friend. He was the person I relied on. It was late afternoon on a Sunday and we talked again about the messy breakup Mike was going through from a very short relationship, and we talked about random stuff, and at some point I cried because depression is like that. When I stopped crying, Mike made some comment about how me crying on his couch wasn’t what he’d been expecting for his day and I semi-laughed and said Well, better than having the devil on your couch and then we both looked at each other with wide eyes for a long time—like, what would it be like if the devil was on your couch? What would the devil get up to?

The next day on my two-hour drive home I kept thinking about that, the devil on your couch, and then in my head the devil was on my couch crying. The whole idea of a heartbroken devil looking for comfort, needing some time to heal, took over my head. I mean, why should the devil be immune to heartbreak? How would the devil cope with heartbreak? Would it be something ethereal, something that lasts for a mere moment, or something more mortal?

When I got home, as soon as I walked in the door I sat down and wrote the entire poem.

Looking back now, I see that I wrote a poem where the devil gets to experience heartbreak in a way that I’ve never gotten to. I guess it’s a slightly over-the-top imagining of dealing with heartbreak in a way I would’ve liked to—comfort food, a bath, crying. And someone there to quietly offer support. My heartbreaks have been met by the people around me shrugging.

And the ending—has the devil made a good or bad decision? Who knows. Do we ever know if something was a good or a bad decision until enough time has passed? And how do we know if enough time is actually enough?

A few weeks after I wrote the poem, Mike and I had a massive fight. I messaged him about something and he took it completely the wrong way, and then every time I replied I think you’ve misinterpreted what I said, he’d get angrier and I’d get more depressed and then I ended up suicidal and then he got angry at me for being suicidal and so I got more suicidal and he got angrier at me for that. It was devastating.

I now have a lot of regrets about ever being friends with Mike, but damn, I got a lot of great poems from all those Sundays we spent sitting on his couch, talking about random stuff. I hope the devil is sitting on his couch. I hope someone in that room is crying.

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