The Renovator

What would love say?

One of my old drawings: hand drawn pencil sketch with the colors digitally inverted.

---

Love is the guest who never knocks.

It does not ask. It simply occupies. A frantic decorator throwing open your windows and dragging your favorite old couch into the street. You stand there in the unexpected commotion, mouth open, tracing the cold metal of the house keys in your pocket. You know you locked the door. You know the frame is intact. And yet, here is the sun, invasive and bright, bleaching the floors and walls you fought to keep protected in the shade.

Some say that Love is exposure, but sometimes it feels more like an interrogation. It leans over the table and asks,

Have you had enough?

And the tragedy is your silence. You haven’t. And you won’t. It has cracked you open like a stone to find the spark inside. A violent cauterizing that leaves a frayed seam in the muscle. Now you are a barometer for the sky. You can feel the old ache coming on whenever the clouds darken. The phantom pain that shows up just before the rain.

Love is a demanding ghost.

It follows you from room to room, insisting on answers to a question it never quite articulates. It mumbles in the corner. A low and rhythmic thrum. The language sounds familiar, like your grandmother’s voice, or a song from a dream you almost remember. But the dialect is foreign. You recognize the shape of the words, but you cannot find the meaning despite a desperate desire for translation. You are a stranger in a house that used to be yours, listening to a tongue you were never taught to speak.

So, you learn to live in the drafty place. You stop checking the locks because there is nothing left to guard. Instead, you watch the way the invasive light dances on the dust of your old life. The uninvited guest is quiet now, asleep in the corner of your chest. The house smells like rain and ozone. It is an exhausting and terrifying haunting, even if you can appreciate the beauty in its form. It is a mirror. Showing you how you are a map of scars and open windows, holding space for the storm. Ready for the ache to tell you exactly where you begin and the world ends.

You stop fighting the silence and begin to inhabit the echo. You realize Love did not come to steal, but to strip the place down until the original studs stand bare. The bones of your old house finally exposed to the atmosphere, you sit on those bleached floors not minding the splinters under your open hands.

Listening. Listening. Listening.

The mumbles in the corner no longer sound like an interrogation, but a lullaby. It is your grandmother’s inflection, yes, but it is also the sound of your son’s laughter. Your daughter’s sleepy sigh. It is the dialect of your marrow. Even your own tongue starts to curl around these new yet ancient shapes. You are no longer the owner of this place. Not even really a tenant. You are the space the wind and voice occupy in the moment. The windows stay open. The couch stays in the street.

You are finally home, even if you had to lose the house to find it.

---

Thank you for being here.

Until next time,

j

Want to read more like this?

Subscribe for the full archive