HOMES ARE SILENT (VESSEL)

Over the week when I’d begun walking myself home, I decided to take the angled upward curve that walked over the path I usually took. The one above the main road, which was lined with old trees and bushes and always smelled like freshly-cut grass, and was lined with trees which had pink flowers which shed all the time and had houses on both sides of the street.

The mini market that stood as a pivot of sorts, right in the middle, and the road that went forward and where one of my brother’s friends lived. But you’d want to walk back to the left hand side to connect back to the main road, and these were where most of the houses were. Along this line would be one of my family’s oldest friends, who had two big dogs and a rosemary plant I had “borrowed” a couple of times, once successfully grown.

But, just down the road, near where this road would connect to the main one, stood this otherwise ordinary and un-particular house, which had a concrete balcony overgrown with vines of yellow jessamine and looked almost uncared for. I always found it a significant point where I would stand outside it and just…stare. I saw a pair of pink sandals out in the driveway once, so I suppose it’s not entirely “empty”, but the way that it stood still, and silent, staring back into me, almost convinced me it was. 

A couple of times I’ve told myself it’d be pretty nice to live there – in someone else’s house. A hundred of these couple times I’ve imagined the interior, which I’ve never seen before, and thought it to be a warm and hollow room that belonged to another house. You’d enter, presumably, and be greeted by an orange interior with a soft couch, and someone’s scarf strewn diagonally over the middle pillow.

And the floors would be wooden, and there’d be wooden frames of pictures lined up along the walls, too. And in front of the couch would be a TV, placed on a dark oak-ish drawer, just above another orange scarf with tassels. And for some reason, in my head, the room always smelled like what I could only ever describe as pickled tangerines and cinnamon. 

Judging from the white window frames and the many windows you’d be able to see from the outside, the floor below the main road that had a gap for passersby to see – an orange interior belonging to what is almost an old grandmother would be a misjudgement on my side. But the door and the warm charms of the houses’ number and the vines all over the place…those were perhaps the contributing factors. 

In fact, if I have went inside, I’d probably find myself quite disappointed. 

No static noise in the background, no feeling of prying eyes over your shoulders, no hollow reflection on the old convex TV screen, staring endlessly back at you. It probably has white floors and a white couch and a modern TV – not like the inside of a turmeric bottle. 

I find myself emotionally “spawning” there when I am frustrated over my math test, and in my room when it’s silent, and when I’m walking uphill the rest of the way home. I am fascinated by that house. Over the insides, which I have created all in my head – over the sound of static TV and the sight of myself, always on the couch, or momentarily expanding this domain and giving it a kitchen derivative of the pantry in my own house, chopping carrots or looking up at…a cross.

A cross.

Now, I don’t know why I created a cross and placed it, in my own little head, the darkest corner in the house deep in the kitchen – just so it can be constant in its judgment, watching me. Always watching me crawl, watching me live in my suburban delusion of a place, that in hindsight, made me uncomfortable. 

I leave the world in abandon. Like I am in a stranger’s house, but neither the house nor the rooms, nor the people – other than me, in my own head – even exist, because I have made up a life that I want to live, but I don’t, because it creeps me out and I don’t feel safe. So eerie, that whenever I walk outside that house after school, over the small steps leading up to the door, with tall leafy reedgrasses lining both sides next to the stone – I can almost imagine someone looking right back at me as I pass.

And the number isn’t even 32C. I just passed by and imagined it was.