the house

I was thinking hard as we walked up the creaky stairs. The oak floors and the white trim combined with the startling vacancy of the house made me feel like I was walking into the scene of a movie, like this empty house was my stage, like the windows and the walls and the rooms without any furniture were waiting for me to do something, anything, to make it movie-worthy.

At the top of the stairs, we parted ways. He in the first room, me in the second. He was handsome, which was my favorite thing about him, because it’s nice to have a handsome man who you aren’t actually attracted to around. Handsome men offer things that less handsome men simply don’t have; they have lying eyes and magenta lips and five-o-clock shadows to die for, all of which you find yourself entirely indifferent to, all of which make you feel, in some odd, twisted, accidental kind of way, more powerful. There is something to be said about resisting the aesthetic charms they know they have in their arsenal. I felt like if the house could talk, it would agree with me. It was an agreeable kind of house.

I walked into the third empty room with the big windows. There was peacefulness in this room. I wondered if it was the very visual and overwhelming unsettledness, the blatant, intangible amount of emptiness that demands this centered sense of self from within when you least expect it. No bed, no table, no books, no clothes, no life.

Just you.