The house

The house was beautiful.

White weatherboard, with accents of green — pale green framing the windows and picket fence, the plants in the front yard a blend of forest hues. Behind the house four fruit trees were in full summer bloom: apples, nectarines and lemons. Birds chittered in branches above.

Everything about the house felt grand. When viewed at just the right moment, the back door’s leadlight window creates a red glow across polished floorboards. The fireplace is of vintage craftsmanship, embellished with painted tiles and an ornate wooden mantelpiece.

During daytime the living area is drenched in northern light. At night, the room’s lampshades refract a sun-like pattern onto the ceiling. That sun, that warmth, never seemed to leave. When it did get cold at night, the fireplace was a warming comfort. The flames coursed through your bones like flowing honey.

It is the largest house we’ve ever lived in. Its cavernous spaces were full of promise. What we saw was a blank canvas, a fresh start. We talked enthusiastically about where things, and ourselves, would belong. Who, or what, would occupy each room.

There is a big difference between a house and a home. A home should be a sanctuary, a place of comfort, a recharge station, a shelter from the innumerable ills of the outside world.

A house on the other hand, is simply a structure that is yet to earn the title of ‘home’. We were hoping that the house we were living in would eventually earn that title.

We moved to the house for her.

When she needed help we didn’t hesitate. She was seeking escape from an undesirable situation, with an undesirable person. We were simply seeking to help. That, we thought, was what friends do.

But the relationship between us soured. Some problems were small, others more significant. And these problems were left to fester, to pile up, to mutate into a nauseatingly nasty beast. There was a turning point where our fresh start began to unravel and became stale.

There are certain moments that have a reverberating impact, for which ‘things’ will never be the same. You know these moments when you come across them. Sometimes they are for better, sometimes for worse, but always different to how they were before.

The power of words can never be understated. When things changed, it was words that propelled us past the point of no return. We had a new normal and it was toxic.

So with that, friends became former friends. And as the dynamic between us shifted, so did the house. It was deep into autumn when it began to change.

The leaves of the fruit trees behind the house were fickle in their appearance, changing from a paler green, to red, to golden, eventually floating from their branches to blend with the soil below. Decaying fruit, half-eaten by the creatures of the yard, nestled amongst fallen leaves. Laid bare, the trees were gnarled and skeletal.

Inside the tension was immense. We avoided her, and she avoided us.

When our paths did collide, it didn’t always go the same way. Sometimes we fought. Sometimes we held our tongues. Sometimes we ignored each other. But no matter what we did, our co-habitation became increasingly untenable. All of our interactions were simply different means to the same end.

The beast of resentment grew larger with time, gorging on the widening rift between us.

She lived at the far end of the house. A narrow hallway serves as the central nerve that connects each room, stretching from the living area to the back door. A journey past her room was required to reach essentials such as the bathroom, toilet and laundry.

Almost all of her time was spent there, shut off from us and the rest of the world. We would often hear her scamper to the kitchen for food, the sound of her shoes clunking down the hallway in the middle of the night, the groan of her car engine, doors slamming.

Not knowing whether she was there or not had us jumping at shadows. The smallest sounds made us anxious. We felt uncomfortable in our own skin.

The presence of a closed door, as we found out, can be intolerably suffocating. A certain blackness emanated from behind it. It felt like a living thing — invisible tendrils of paranoia and discomfort. They would sap our energy and leave us constantly on edge.

Some days we would arrive at the house, park in the driveway for a minute or so, and then leave again. It was a matter of being absolutely anywhere else but there.

Those big rooms and their high ceilings felt ten times more imposing, and us ten times smaller. The walls of the hallway seemed to close in like a garbage compactor. Even the fireplace stopped working, just as the winter chill began to really dig its heels in.

We longed to leave, and we almost did, but she beat us to it.

It was the middle of winter when she left the house for the final time. We parted on bitterly fractured terms. She was afforded a fresh start someplace else, a new chapter of her life that we won’t play a part in. We were left with the house.

When she left, the beast that had consumed the house spat us out and left us, exhausted but alive. Opening her old door, letting the light in, was an enormous relief. I’d like to think the black thing that lived beyond her door withered and died when we opened it, it’s tendrils turning to dust.

With her gone, the house seemed different again. Echoes of her still remain, some physical, some not. The space itself seems closer to the house that we moved into, but still not quite the same — a sad imitation of the hope and promise we saw when we first arrived. The walls are a mosaic of painfully fresh memories, imbued with a twisted air of regeneration.

The house never became a home, and it’s doubtful it ever will. But given its capacity for change, perhaps it can surprise us.