Learn the Language

THE HOUSE said without any words, that we were poor. Poor and illiterate. Brown and fleshy. An almost distortion of a person, and yet not quite recognized. Standing barefoot in front of that mansion, I didn't matter so much. I had seen, and trekked, carved, clawed my way into existence and it stared back at me without understanding. 

Material, carefully constructed by bricks and slabs of mortar. The house was tangible. A recognizable shape of value. 

This house had been built for success. Time had been spent on its assembly, precious patience shaped its care. Every particle, resource, clay slab and brick was coddled into place. Its foundation, skeleton and innards were attended to by human hands. Even the exterior, where the earth met the house, was the object of control. Flowers sprung where they were allowed to. Grass cut and tidy. Sprinklers embedded to protect the vegetation.

That house never had to reach for empathy. For that reason it remained gluttonous, feeling entitled to swallow the land around it; including the water spent on its lawn; each gardener used to plant every seed to maintain the artificial evergreen; the maids attentive to its internal ornamentation.

The house was born with the feeling that its place on earth was the making of self-determinization, rather than luck and timing. 

How ugly, to know so little and to take so much. To remain a baby, despite not being. How lucky was that house to exist and remain oblivious. Lucky was it to know nothing, and to keep knowing nothing. That its owners shushed and excused all negative opinions on its inception for being. 

The house represented an idea of beautiful; of care.

Other homes appeared weak in comparison. Inferior for their suffering. For the lack of help. In my mind I could see the apartment. Not even a house so much. But a place to live and die. Rotting alive. 

Although, there I heard it again, was my home weak for lacking? 

Our little apartment in Elkhart, without rooms for doors. The nights spent sleeping on the floor. At some point, I had convinced myself that our home wasn't made strong. That our apartment was weak for its ridges, its cracked paint and smoldering walls. Yet now, standing so little, staring up at that house, I felt nothing but heat. Not jealousy, or envy. But a pressure like a thick fog, in the form of steam off heat. 

It was searing my insides, this feeling. It threatened to boil over and spew from my mouth in the form of extremities. 

The house did not interpret my anger as a threat. 

In the pitch of  night, I remained unnoticed. Dark against dark, I was indistinguishable from everyone else. 

But I watched that house and I knew. I had studied, and I had read. I knew about this house and what it did. And so I hid my light from it and smiled and nodded until I was close enough to get inside and bed it. 

Only then, would it grasp intention.

The house, a fat tick, and me, the blade slash its insides out.