The New Home

“The Props assist the House

Until the House is built

And then the Props withdraw

And adequate, erect,

The House support itself

And cease to recollect”.

–Emily Dickinson

A building like many others stands not too tall in a somewhat peaceful and bourgeois part of town. Sometimes, when crossing the street, people might still look up at the building with their hands protecting their eyes from sunlight, in admiration—the construction still hanging to its status of ‘new.’ It does not deserve the praise, however. If one were to look closely, one would see the crackling corners of the opening arch of concrete, or even the imperfections in the darkly laminated glass doors. But foreign eyes see beauty everywhere. Looking from the south windows, from behind the plastic grids that protect toddlers from plummeting to their deaths into the three-car-sized pharmacy parking lot, you might see the main avenue where cars crash into one another every once in a while and hesitant protesters sing the national anthem in defense of the President on Sunday afternoons.

Inside the building, hollowness persists. The inhabitants tend toward middle age—most are urban nomads who’ll leave in a month or two. So, the sound of renovations permeates and pollutes the atmosphere. Through the identical corridors of each floor, the drumming of hammers and the riffs of electric screwdrivers echo in conversation, one or two dog barks occasionally joining in. Through one of these doors, you can get to the New Home.

Walking in, the universe is drenched in whiteness. You look to your left and see the small pile of dishes on the sink, two or three flies buzzing around the stains of tomato sauce on the tableware. The entire place is covered in things—purses and coats and letters and bills and coins seem to cover the surface of everything in sight. It overwhelms and suffocates in its uselessness. Cupboards brim with mugs, and cups, and wedding-gifted glasses that are never used. There are too many things in the New Home for four people: too many knives and spoons and forks and placemats and pans – they accumulate as useless memorabilia of our existence.

Inside the New Home, you reside in the chaos of paralysis. With your bent body, you sit on the jeans-like blue sofa bleached by sunlight. You position yourself where the units of the furniture meet, where wood and metal coincide in a brutal embrace and create soreness. You turn to the TV that, when turned off, reflects the mediocre painting on the wall behind you with its Pollockian splashes of bluish grays. You turn it on and start looking for something to watch—which, when proven impossible hours later, leaves you with nothing to do but wander around.

A while ago, I began hearing things in the mediocre darkness of the New Home, reverberating off the cold beige ceramic of the floor. In the silence, I could hear the cry of the wind or the drip of the sink—the sinks always leak in the New Home. Sometimes I could hear the sound of the wailing drafts entering the space through small gaps on the windpanes, or the blow of a shampoo bottle falling to the floor as if by itself. Maybe the sound of piping as well. Sometimes, when there was little to do, I liked to imagine there were ghosts in the New Home. A building so new should not have ghosts, and yet the atmosphere seemed to attract the fantasy of them. I sometimes imagined that when their houses were destroyed, they glued themselves to the iron skeleton of the building and escaped the melodrama of being left to saunter around, homeless.

Walking down the corridor, you will find doors of an egg-shell white. They were painted white when we moved in, when the construction was as fresh as a tomato turned red. But now the color is peeling and revealing the doors’ true nature—a honey-colored oak. There are three rooms, and when you walk by, you do not care to go inside the first one. It is just as colorless and cluttered as the living room.

When walking into my room, you notice the mistakes of the paint job and the scarred furniture. The room is clean like a hospital, except for the little corner where old notebooks and clothes that are not yours or do not fit you anymore pile up and the bed that stays put together with too many cushions and pillows, creating a carnivorous mouth of fabric that seems to envelop and digest you.

I started having trouble sleeping since I installed myself in my room at the New Home. One afternoon, I locked myself in my room and closed the windows and curtains and watched Taxi Driver for a couple of hours. Those hours of utter darkness made the place less lonely, somehow. I cleaned my nose with a piece of toilet paper from the roll I kept in my bedside table, because I usually felt sick.

I remember the smell of dampness of the Old Home— sticking to the walls, the clothes, the furniture, and the skin. And, despite that putrefied, bacterial scent, the blue wall of the living room always looked fresh as a new summer sky. I miss it, and the dark hardwood floors, and the childish freedom of having something you can’t name.

The walls of the New Home are not as clean as they once were, and the floors are constantly covered with our black and brown hairs and dust. The walls with their dark, sand-like color are half in shadow and absorb the light. And, at night, when we turn on the lights, they have an unnatural yellowish color that fails to fill the space. It remains half in the shadows. For perpetuity.

Home is just a vacancy now—a square without both color and people. Is it even fair to call it home? It is where I slept and where I ate and where I was confined, and yet, if I were never to see it again, I would be unbothered. Indifferent.

The place I live now doesn’t have noisy streets like those that surround the block of the New Home, and at night there’s surrounding liveliness and youth but no drunken screams coming from the seafood restaurant down the street or the sound of the national anthem, seeping inside through the little gaps on the window panes.