My Big Old House

Asking a new question, one I’ve never heard before, that makes my brain bend a little, is the quickest release of tension I’ve encountered.

Most days, navigating the world is like being trapped in a big old house. I know all the twists and turns and secret passageways and the sunny little rooms that are nice to sit in. I pace the same corridors and staircases over and over, until I think I might go crazy with the repetition.

Out of the windows I glimpse the world just outside the house. I see its cycles of expansion and contraction, blooming green and purple and white and every other color before shriveling down brown and black and brittle.

I see this cycle so clearly, and the energy of the rhythm it carries, but I can have no part in it. There’s always a barrier, a pane of glass between me and it. I can see it happening in front of me.

One day, I discover a small door that I have overlooked. I revel in the initial excitement upon opening it, both relieving and refreshing. I see a corridor that leads to a different part of the house: rooms that I never knew were there. The wood is the same age and the furniture isn’t all that different, but somehow, this wing of the house seems to be different in kind, though belonging to the same world.

When I go to bed that night, my head feels loose and flexible. On this night, my house feels a little bigger, which makes my bedroom feel cozy and familiar instead of stale, the way it felt that morning.

The next day, I go into the new part of the house again. I sit in its rooms, look out of the windows, and absorb my new vantage points of the outside. I develop a slightly new understanding of the shape of the house from the outside. I discover that some of the windows open. When I open them, I can feel the air from the outside and inhale the thick, savory mixture of pollen and car exhaust.

I go back again the next day, and the day after that, and on and on until I’ve run my hand over every sofa arm, gripped the back of every chair, settled on every sunny windowsill. I’ve stood in every doorway measuring the opening with my arms. I’ve sampled each wood floor and rug under my bare feet. This new part of the house has now been incorporated into my original understanding of what the house was, and now it’s not special. It’s just more of the thing I call house.

Until I find a new passageway, a new room, a new conceptualization of the house when I thought I had uncovered all it had to offer.

Today I found a new door. It had been there all along. I may need to find another one eventually, but there’s never not going to be a door.

I also know that I can never leave this house.

When I am at my worst, the world feels small and established and...rigid. At my best, the things I think I know about the world feel as though they could be brushed away in a second.

Sometimes, all I need is a reconceptualization of what I thought I knew.

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