silent witness
september 24 | weekly warm-up
Write a letter to a place. It could be your current home, or another place that you have called home in the past. It could be a city where you lived or love to visit. You could write about a place that you’ve never been. A country you’ve always wanted to experience, or even a paradise or parallel universe that exists in your mind. You can be open about the meaning that you assign to the word place, but keep in mind that the exercise is to write to a real or imagined location about what you want to say to it and what questions you want to ask it.
When we moved into our townhouse, we had a baby girl, a 5-year old son, and a couple’s therapist. But we were delusional, and we wanted to keep our delusions, so we stopped going to therapy not long after moving in. Our newly rented three bedroom townhouse with its pale yellow paneling and forest green shutters was our next level up. First, we had an apartment in Baltimore. Then, a nicer apartment in Columbia. And now a townhouse in Silver Spring. Perfect for a little family of four. We would go on to have another baby four years later. Three kids being raised by two wounded adults who didn’t know what they were doing but wanted to do their best. The townhouse became our silent witness, watching our dreams and delusions play out.
The house saw our messiest moments over the years. It saw the fort years, when I considered just leaving the sheets up all the time because the kids wanted to build them every single day. It saw the slime years, when the girls were constantly making DIY slime out of detergent and glue, experimenting with it, spilling it onto the carpet leaving deep red, green, and purple stains deep in the fibers that we never got out. It saw the unsolved mysteries. The house knows who broke the toilet in the downstairs bathroom that one year. Who was the last one in possession of the remote control that we never found. And the snooping. Did the house judge me? For tip-toeing downstairs to read my partner’s text messages while he was in the shower? For invading my son’s room, looking for clues when his grades, energy, and smile were lacking, and he wouldn’t tell us what was wrong? What did the house know?
Sometimes I would lay on my back on the bed in the basement and stare at the ceiling, wondering how I got on this roller-coaster and how I would ever get off. Raising three kids with a man that I couldn’t be myself with, who didn’t understand my language, who didn’t know how to hold space for his own emotions let alone mine. Did the house see me walking on eggshells and smiling through resentment? Did it hear me screaming out in anger and ecstasy? Did the house know that I was expecting it to provide more than shelter? That I was expecting it to fix us?
What I know is that this house has seen our love, our mess, our joy, and our growth. It’s been steadfast, thriving when we’re thriving, and struggling when we were struggling. To draft this reflection, I thought about what I might say in a letter to this constructed kin, these bricks, these walls. And it turns out that I had a lot to say! I went on to write pages and pages about my history with this place, and I made some eye-opening discoveries about myself and my partner, and how much my feelings towards the house through different seasons reveal truths that have been otherwise hard to access, and even harder to admit.
This week, your exercise is to write a letter to a place. I found this piece on McSweeney’s to be a clever example of this.