The Living Room Has Changed

The living room has changed. It’s nice, I admit, though I’m not great with change. I find some pain in it. I find some pain in what is lost to it. The rooms of this house are always in motion. One guest room still holds the air from my old bedroom, with flecks of the old purple paint still visible from strange angles only I would ever see. 

I came back after a difficult first few months in my new flat, an odd number of years old. A brief stay home from an unfriendly city, with an unlucky crew of strangers, in a wipe-down boarding hall. I sat in an armchair in this warm living room and had conversations with people that knew me well. I ate their food and slept in the bed my parents bought me urgently from the charity shop after I came home from the hospital with a broken leg. This bed that I’d hated as a snapped teenager was now so nourishing. Just as breaking my leg was awful as it healed, but would go on to teach me a lot, I knew leaving home was necessary. But I hadn’t realised how much I had missed this dose of comfort. If I hadn’t jumped off of that roof I may have never stopped sleeping on a mattress on the floor. If I’d never moved out of my parent’s house I may have never learnt to accept the pain of life-changing and its components becoming lost.

There was a dog and a cat I knew. We had seen each other after school, on evenings and weekends, as I laid on the living room carpet in the middle of the week, filling out applications and order forms for my dismal catalogue sales job. My darker days of deep unemployment, where they would silently watch me, puzzled as I scrambled to get dressed just before my parents returned home from work. The dog was big and black with glassy eyes to his gentle soul, calm and observant. As I stroked him he tilted his head up at me and I was reminded of how he would stare up at us when we spoke to him, turning his head to one side when we did something he didn’t understand. I wondered if he understood why on one normal day I left the house and just didn’t come home again. I wondered if he knew why I was now back. He was getting older now, his energy growing softer, no longer in his bouncing youth. When I was younger my dad would occasionally try to wrestle me on this blue carpet, and our dog would not be able to contain himself. He would be straight at the edge of the ring, licking us to try and tag himself in. I have not seen this kind of openly vulnerable friendliness while I have been away, everything has been much more complicated than this. The cat was small and uninterested, as always. After she sleeps she wants to play, and when she decides we’re done she wants to groom herself before purring into a croissant shape on top of someone. She is still young and leaps around casually, shuffling her legs as she sleeps under a stool, in chasing dreams of long grass and hiding places. Her dynamic with the dog is one of parallel running tolerance and acceptance. There is no real bond, but no conflict either, only some intrigue. 

The dog arrived here when he was four, raised by and alongside cats in a household that couldn’t give him what he needed as he grew into himself. He was the most polite dog I had ever met, and over the years of knowing him, he healed my deep distrust of dogs, leftover in me from accompanying my dad as a young child while we walked our previous dog through our intimidating neighbourhood parks. When we brought home our cat she was still a very young kitten, adopted by us from a kitchen floor crawling with multiple litters of fuzzy little futures. She had barely been handled and was very shy at first, spending a good amount of her life getting adjusted to being comfortable with people, often being known to bolt at any disturbance. Growing up, she learnt the ropes from careful and distant observation of the dog, whose cool attitude would rub off on her gradually. So we had a cat who acted kind of like a dog who acted kind of like a cat. I missed them both when I headed back after the Christmas break, to a place that didn’t uphold a trace of their non-judgemental ease and acceptance. The pain helps you grow, but it still hurts.

The halls I lived away in were a kind of home to me, in a warped way and an austere sense. I felt this only as my things sat piled and packed to depart, in the corner of the bare room as the sun cast shapes in through the twin windows. Although it meant that I would get to return to my parent’s house for the summer, I felt the hit of loss at the idea of leaving this room behind. This was my only safe sanctuary in the pioneering days of a new phase of life. This was the first place in my life that I lived away from where I was raised, out on my own. As my parents waited in the car downstairs for me, their second and only visit here since dropping me off on my first day, I felt deeply sad at the idea of locking up this room that I’d had such a hard time in. I turned and hugged the wall with tears in my eyes at the thought of never seeing this place again. I desperately hung in the silent air, taking in as much as I could of this place that only suddenly felt so sacred to me in the last hours before it was time for me to close it off. I took too long in there, unable to pull myself away, not knowing how to break the gaze of a final look at something that felt so important. I abandoned that room only when the pain forced me to. I tried to gather myself in the hallway, through the staircase and the courtyard, but each hurt me more as I saw them for the last time. As I climbed into the back of the car, my parents asked me what I’d been doing up there. I tried to hide my wet eyes and told them I’d just been saying goodbye to my old room. I did the same thing as I departed the low house against the park a year later. I’ve done it everywhere I’ve lived since.