My House

Most people start out adulthood with a set of materials and are told to go off and build a house. People of my age and demographic by and large set off to build pretty nice homes in solid stable areas. As time passed, some people moved to new homes while others stuck around and improved their starter homes. Some people moved other people into their homes, or moved into homes together. Now by and large people appear to be living in large, comfortable, safe homes where they are building memories and families together.

I started adulthood with a pretty solid set of materials: Nothing super fancy but I definitely had the goods to put together a quality home — if I had the proper blueprints. Where others looked around and saw how good homes were built and began to emulate the things needed to start their home correctly I mostly neglected my materials, unsure of what fits where or in what order. A lot of people had guidance and mentorship along the way to correct planning errors before they became structural deficiencies over time, where I mostly used the “looks good to me!” method, not knowing the difference between a curtain wall and a load-bearing wall. A few times I had a pretty solid structure going but circumstances like the 2008 financial crisis or COVID-19 came along and destroyed what little I had managed to build. Sometimes another person wandered into my house while I was building and I had to change plans to accommodate their needs only for them to move along at which point I’d either burn the house down myself or move into another house with no real planning or foresight just to get away from the memories.

Now I’m building my house again. From the outside it’s beginning to come together because at this point I’ve had years of watching other people and their lovely homes in so many beautiful locations so I at least know what a good house is supposed to LOOK like. On the inside it’s a different story — to an outsider it appears that things don’t fit quite where they should because instead of doing things the correct way I probably placed them there in response to something that happened on another build and it makes sense to me there’s just a system to it and WHATEVER YOU DO DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING which makes it a bit challenging for visitors. So my house remains empty. Just me. My house is cold but it’s safe and everything is where I put it.

And no one even knows where I live.

This is not a love story.