Construction

The old chair still smells like someone else’s house. Like the stale cigarette aftertaste of a bad dream. I’m not sure if the furniture is new or if I’m the room that’s been re-arranged. A cigarette that burned itself slowly down - reminding idle fingers of what’s at stake. Am I the chair or the smoke?

Some days I’m not so sure. There’s something old in what feels new. The disorientation of a renovation that hadn’t quite been signed off on.

When you’ve spent most of your life constructing home from the inside, you find curtains drawing an uncertain question in the space between nest and grave. You’d think a new chair might read like invasion. But instead it surprises you with sunshine after the haunted nooks and crannies showed their teeth - something that might scurry closer if you looked away.

So the eyes, they learned to be in all the corners at once.

So many angles to see with. A kind of alarmist alert that doesn’t leave room for rest; only the kind of sight that finds shapes in the dark.

It’s a strange thing to befriend the shadows.
You kind of become your own haunting.

A ghost of a shape, slowly building in the shadows. The house stopped being a room and I learned to become the furniture - watching myself slowly rearrange. Moving room to room, feeling the uncertain wobble of the walls closing in. Either that, or the continual expansion to meet them. Tears became decorations: painting darkness against the walls and tending the shadows until they became desks and bookshelves. Drawers and beds. Chairs and couches that cradled the restless parts of me that could never find stillness.

How can everything be so still when all you are is in motion?

But somehow time stood still. Seeing the seasons change, and then change again - but always one layer removed through the glass pane. Such a thin thing holding the world at bay, just out of reach. Always a hallway but never a door. Life on occasion stopped to visit, but mostly it felt like it was just on its way through.

Rearranging.

A world that shrinks to a room and then becomes a house. Either that or I learned to be the walls: one can never be quite sure. I let the darkness decorate so thoroughly that the shadows announced themselves as sunbeams. Subtle at first, like refracting light through the glass.

The house: it began to breathe.

Stuttering into motion: like slowly waking up to a home that’s mine but no longer feels like me. Almost as if somehow... the whole thing had been a dream. A cigarette burning just low enough to remind the hand about the fingers. The thing that forgets it was even smoking after suffocating for so long.

That’s when the furniture became a stranger and the construction I didn’t know I was under announced itself as light.