Personal Space

[poliphilo]

I was sitting quietly by myself in someone else's space.

I was a little anxious.

I could feel that I didn't fit. The walls were full of memories and habits and aspirations that weren't mine.

Not ghosts, not hostile, just not to do with me.

The weather of another personality.

All houses are haunted houses.

I am sitting now in my own space. Settled. Attending to my own weather. Listening to the noises I don't normally bother to hear: the hum of the computer, the clock that goes plonk, plonk, plonk quite slowly like water dropping into a galvanised tank and the other clock that goes tick tick tick quite fast like an insect.

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Thank you for your fine description of your clocks and your space.

I've moved into a rental house, as you know, and it never feels like mine. It's haunted, so to speak, by the people who lived here--the landlord women who won't allow me to take up the ugly carpet because it was theirs (forty years ago, when they were growing up! Can you imagine how awful it is now? But sentiment rules, and in their minds it's still lovely brown and soft, not the old rubbly blanket it's turned into over the years).

I wonder when it will become my own home? Probably never, because for some reason I don't love it here--the ceiling is too high: I rattle around in this big place.

I'm like the fishwife in the fairy tale who keeps getting her wish and is never satisfied.

(I'm already ready to move on, get a place without a brown carpet.)

I want to haunt my own house. I'm an interloper here. The carpet reminds me who really lives here: two girls in the 1950s.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I like high ceilings. I supose it's what I'm used to.

Do these women expect to move back in some day? I can't think of any other reason for them wanting to preserve it as a shrine to their childhood.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

The sisters plan to eventually sell the house to the church next door. It seems to be an old plan.

I can't imagine what their problem is--one lives in Georgia (five hours away) and the other in California. They never come here.

I'll buy another house someday, and paint every wall. (These are all ivory, forever--I'm not allowed to paint, have pets, or pull up the awful carpet. But it's still a pleasant house, somehow. I just itch to be free of their haunting it, in their hovering way.)