A House of Lives
#BlackLivesMatter
This article is raising awareness about the
center for black equity
Which SUPPORTS the BLACK LGBTQ+ Community
Lying on my bed, legs up in the air,
Tired from the long walk.
This little blue box, with its words on the walls
The fan blowing,
The heat breathing heavily on me—
Fast and without mercy.
This is my life, now.
Everything I own, everything I need—
Is in this room with me.
It’s where I write,
Think, sing, cry, laugh.
Even bathe, crouching in my little bucket.
I’ve stared at these walls for hours,
Eyes open in the day,
Closed as I sleep.
Nothing needs explaining.
I crazy dance, I speak out loud in accents—
I am hideous and beautiful.
In here, I am simply me.
The world outside, though foreign, is also mine.
I can open the door, a window—
To the joy of my neighbor children and their laughter.
To the natural beauty and the unpaved roads.
Walk down the street to my best friend’s house,
To sit with her as she washes clothes,
Sipping mate. Simply existing.
It’s all right there,
Just beyond the door.
Clap my hands, a mosquito is gone.
Blink my eyes, and so is this room.
This world. This life.
Wherever I go, I can stare at the walls long enough to find myself again.
But the world outside belongs to the place and the place alone.
Within these blue walls,
Encased in words from my past,
Others from my ongoing, on-growing present—
I am home.
If only I could keep this little blue box with me,
Hold on to the possibility of opening that door—
To this town,
These people,
To this life.
If only I could build a house,
Of all the rooms I’ve ever lived in—
With doors and windows to all that existed outside them.
With the people still living there,
The smells, the sounds, the memories.
A house with rooms in different countries,
And different times.
But as I cannot take the places with me—
I cannot make that house.
So instead, the house makes me.
It lives inside me.
And from this tiny blue house in Paraguay,
I can walk to the cozy studio in Boston,
To my pink room in Singapore.
My brother’s apartment in Spain.
A child’s room in Australia.
Within me, I carry all the rooms, the lives—
And the feelings and events that transpired inside them.
But the front door keeps changing.
Everything fades over time—
From reality into snapshots.
Which is why when I read this one day,
This moment will be a dream.
Like looking through a hazy glass window,
I’ll remember the love, the memories.
I’ll remember lying on the bed,
On the soft, orange quilt Mom brought me—
Holding the Sharpie pen Dad sent in the mail.
Perhaps the intermittent clicks of bugs,
The routine rumbling of the bus passing by.
But I cannot touch them—
They are no longer real.
I know now, though,
That just as I will always hold this house—
Carrying the blue walls with me,
My inscriptions, thoughts, memories filling it—
It, too, will always hold a part of me.
Paint the walls, change the furniture,
Break it down, build it again—
But just as we keep every home, every room in our souls—
Every house keeps its own inhabitants,
Living on in some way.
You can read more by Anita on Medium.