Little Rooms

The girl would always come back. After she was done skipping outside, once she had finished swinging between the tree trunks, when she decided that she had run far away enough that it was time to turn around and go back. She would then return to the little rooms.

Doors

When I came home last week, I found myself standing your closet, surrounded by all of the things you didn’t take with you.

Each room in the house heaved silently, as though the house knew that it need not be fully awake and alert without any of us there it inhabit it.

Empty houses that have been empty for so long still don’t lose their structural integrity. But after awhile, they begin to lose that little drop of nostalgia that makes them feel so safe. After all, how can nostalgia exist without someone around to feel it? To remember all of the things that occurred once, and won’t happen again. The moments that only barely exist because you or I have stored it away in the safe that holds our memories. A safe that sometimes you cannot even bear to open.

Inside of your closet is a door. And when I opened that door, I could smell the scent of my childhood come wafting down the stairs. Asking me to remember it all over again. To look around that little room, to see all the things I have left behind.

Asking me to open the doors of my heart.

Windows

On Saturdays, when you would blow the leaves or cut the grass or clean the gutters, I was inside. I used to wake up to the sound of your sweeping up nature’s bounty, and putting it in its right place, only to repeat it all over again a few weeks later.

I would wake up slowly, my eyes fluttering open and closing shut again, letting the sun rise higher into the sky before I would begin to rise from my bed.

Walk over to the window to make sure that it was really you who was out there. Pull the string that swung as the cool air puffed its way down through the vents. Open the blinds to see you standing on the deck, in the yard, on a ladder. Be sure that you were safe: that the wind hadn’t swept you away, the ground hadn’t swallowed you whole.

What was it about knowing that you were right there—that if I needed to, I could reach out and call out to you? Comfort comes in doses of proximity.

When I was six, we built our own little house together. You bought it in pieces: thin crusts of teak wood that could have been mistaken for gingerbread, had it been just a little bit thicker and just a little bit warmer from being baked in the oven (instead of pulled out of a cardboard box).

It grew slowly, as we glued together one piece to the next, with little more than a foundation — a square wooden box that was barely anything to look at — to show for our week’s worth of work. But then came the walls, and a door, the roof with each of its shingles lined up to perfection.

Last: the windows. In this little wooden dollhouse, they were the baby’s breath in a bouquet of flowers, the lace on the edge of a tablecloth. Delicate details that no one ignores, yet somehow always fails to notice. The windows came wrapped in slips of paper, each piece of plastic with an individual cover to keep the pretend glass from getting pretend cracks in it.

The windows were made of thin plastic, ruled with perfectly straight black lines to make up the windowpanes. When I rubbed my finger over them, they felt like the transparencies that my teacher used in her math lessons at school. I watched as you took a small drop of glue and rubbed it alongside the window, carefully painting the edge without streaking the glass. And then, gently placed it in the walls of our house.

We built a front porch, an attic, a chimney. But I couldn’t stop staring through the windows. From the inside out: the way that I would when I would watch you pull out of the driveway in the morning. From the outside in: the way that I would when looking into other people’s houses at their dinner tables when we would drive home, late at night.

All of them, windows into worlds that I couldn’t (didn’t yet) understand. Places that I still had to go to/fall through/run away from before I would know what I was looking at.

Walls

Standing in the attic, I remember running. I ran away just once, and didn’t go very far. I crawled up the rungs of my treehouse — a wooden plank nestled between two twin sister trees, less of a house and more of a perch. A nest for a bird that is afraid to leave the warmth of a few twigs.

I looked into the windows of our house, hoping to never go inside of it again. I closed my eyes tight, pressing my eyelids together, and wished for my own house. For my perfect dollhouse to come to life. For my own world to spring into existence.

I wished hard, with everything that I had. But nothing happened. So, I decided to go home. I walked the twenty feet across the yard, over the deck, and through the french doors.

What I didn’t know was that my wish would come true. Ten years later, I left that house to start one of my own. You dropped me off and hugged me tight, and helped me hang a curtain from the window.

My first week, I cried every single night. When I couldn’t see the shadow of your footsteps from under the crack of my door. Each time I looked outside expecting to see you, but saw a thousand strangers on the city sidewalks, instead. When I knew you weren’t there on the other side of the wall as I slept safely through the night.

I cried for a small girl in a little room, which now seemed so far away.