Houses

Throughout our lives we usually have more than one house. Some we grow up in, some we spend holidays in, some are ours, temporary of for more than just a little time. Some we adopt in the secret of our souls just because we can feel them speaking to us and for some we may be longing our entire lives...

A house exists outside our physical person as well as inside, and sometimes from the inner house, carried in our soul, a sort of spiritual distortion of reality emanates outwardly. This happens for most people with their childhood house. I grew up in a partially moldy house, who forced all the members of the family to reunite in one room for the winter period. Tall ceilings, wooden doors and windows. Ice flowers on the windowpane in freezing weather, a mushy black stuff in the lower margins of the window in wet weather. The house sometimes scared me when it was squeaking from its floors, sometimes warned me of all that was missing in its human inhabitants when it was almost echoing under the pale electric light in the evenings. It felt a big too big, yet it had peaceful corners, and its own smells. In times of not so much happiness it allowed a kind of retracting into those corners, into the neutrality of its brick-wall entity that was re-comforting. I sometimes blamed a certain kind of aloofness in my own life on the out-of-time character of this house. It was, at that time, trending flats... studios, one bedroom, two bedrooms, whatever. Sharing a block of flats with a bunch of characters that tended to enter their neighbors' life... I wanted us to have a flat. finally we got one, we moved, and a bit of me remained there. It was never the same. I still wonder the rooms of my childhood house in my dreams. I think it is mostly because with houses we almost never get closure, we are not able to visit them later and acknowledge how they "betrayed" us now, and have grown to love other inhabitants...

I have sometimes established a link, known just by me and the house, with completely foreign buildings, with old flats that seemed out of place in the large buildings with many steps they were in, with some nice marbled staircase, wide and flooded by sun rays... some other houses just wink to me when I pass them on the street.
But it remains yet to be done the feeling of having a home, as if something in my soul refuses to settle to a new building, or maybe it isn't the right time for this... the nostalgia of the childhood house is still present, despite all odds.

There are also houses that I've considered obnoxious or boring, and then there are all the hideous productions of uninspired modern design which have no voice of their own, no corners to hide in for a relaxing lecture, no significant windows to frame the outside world as viewed from a house. And the long dreamed for meeting of a city house with the nature around it, of a city house with a garden... maybe an illusion of well being and comfort, with the illusion of a little cat and a few flower beds. Sometimes I can hardly tell if I am just kidding myself or my intuition still works and if what I feel would be nice really would be so...

We have dwellings and houses in our soul, empty or furnished, windowed or closed. We have people that feel like houses, in a positive way, if we are lucky. Are we a house, a home for others?

And when in my dreams I walk through the rooms of my old houses or of my grandparents' houses, am I there or are they just shadows in my soul?