House of your dreams

In the kitchen of my old house on East Main street in Ashland, it is dark and colorless, fading to black at the edges...a cluttered dreadful mess, piles of sorrow and dark feelings. Molly is here, but there is no detectable human presence. I leave the house to do something about a name? Why a name? What do I have to fix? 

I return through the backyard, into the back door, down the hallway in deeply etched pen and ink darkness, fading in the surroundings like a comic-book vignette. 

I’ve come back to feed Molly because if I didn’t, no one would. She is old, with white on her muzzle and white wiry hairs in her soft black coat. She is bound to the house, and no one is there. I don’t know who the no-ones are, why they aren’t there or when they’ll be back if ever... as always… but in this past I am not bound to Molly. I simply love her.   

And she is so so happy to see me. In her excitement, she spills a bowl of something dark, flops on her back wiggles in the puddle. I try to clean her up.  

Despite the bleak sadness, it feels… static? gone? A significant place, intimidating, and intense, but the dust is gathering dust. It isn’t IN me, doesn’t get into me. Once, but not now, while still being ... awful?

Houses are common dream metaphors. Like curated sets of emotional states, evocative of what was and what it means now, familiar yet strange feelings overlaid on the geography of the past. For me, they are often dark and haunted, rotting floorboards, sadness, graying and heavy, cobwebbed. Sometimes they are places I’ve lived, often this house on East Main street. Sometimes they are places I could have lived, but the future didn’t pivot at the right moment. They have secret passageways and sometimes light, but more often darkness permeates, like sad in the wood grain. They are messy, complicated, poignant. They are not contained. Usually.  

Awake now, I lay in bed sweating and asserting myself onto the pillows. I could not get back by will or by feel into the house again, but I tried and tried because it all felt so unfinished. This house needs. Me. Something, tending, attention, but it is something ultimately not mine to fix or save, even if I want to. It’s too late for anything but compassion.