Home Stage

Why do people say, “make yourself at home”? No one actually expects that. It’s nothing anybody wants. You mean I should show up at someone’s home and pull off my socks or my stockings and toss them into a corner? Scratch myself somewhere unsavory? Pick a booger and roll it into a ball right in front of my host? Maybe head to that polite person’s fridge and start poking through its contents, drinking milk straight from the carton? You don’t do that when you’re a guest – unless, of course, you’re at your significant other’s the day before moving in together. It’d be far more apt to say, “Welcome! Make yourself a guest!” Be a guest and don’t forget it for a minute, okay? If you’re overcome with boredom here and feel a yawn coming on, then suppress it or at least cover your mouth. You could, all in all, consider whom you came to visit. “When in Rome,” as the saying goes. Act the way guests act when you’re a guest and not in your own home. This here is my property, a fact more or less equivalent to the theatrical fourth wall. The boundary is invisible, search as high or low as you please, but if you do start looking, then you’re sure to bump against it. Best to not even try. I might as well just throw you the hell out if you start making yourself at home, you hear? Send you packing to your own place where you can make yourself whatever you wish – at home, for all I care.

People have always liked to imagine inanimate things as animate. I don’t believe that objects and places have souls, but if I were made to propose what kinds of items could be living, then I’d say socks. Yet in that case, socks’ souls would be unlike those of humans. Ancient Greeks toyed with the idea that the basis of love is this: long ago, every human had four arms, four legs, and two heads. Then, Zeus split the arrogant creature in two with a lightning bolt. The halves have been seeking each other ever since. There’s a certain degree of logic to the allegory, because people do enjoy thinking and acting in pairs – there are two identical beds in the bedroom, two armchairs in the living room, two sinks in the bathroom. Anyway, I meant to talk about socks. Socks are dubious couples: they’re sold in pairs and connected by a durable plastic strip, but as soon as you cut that strip in half, the socks instantly try to flee from each other; to forcefully part. Socks are like cats – they prefer to walk alone. Most times, they use a washing machine for their getaway. The inside of a washing machine is truly a mysterious place: like a cave through which one sock slips away to the netherworld. A portal to an alternate reality that is inhabited by millions of lone socks. A world where couples are forbidden; where every house has just one bed, one armchair, one sink. I’m sure all those socks are extremely happy there in their solitude.

It’s becoming more and more popular to knock down walls in homes. If it isn’t load-bearing, then down with it. All to make the space more spacious; to create air, room to breathe. For instance, many homes no longer have a wall separating the kitchen and the living room. You could do the same here. There are even baths at the foot of the beds in some particularly modern hotels – why not in one’s own home as well? So, down with walls wherever at all possible. But when walls are leveled in one place, they rise again in another. Even if you can’t see them. Walls have been springing up around facades in particular. They support ceilings, sure, but are also the type not made from building materials – like those of welfare. Invisible walls that partition cities like a butcher with a hock of meat. Not chopping away, but walling in. If you want to get to the other side of that wall, then you’ll have to climb over, and it’s no cakewalk – scaling the Great Wall of China would be easier. The walls generally have no doors and even if they do, then they’re the kind no ordinary key will open. And who holds the key? They claim you should look around the market to find it. But where, exactly? Who can say? Maybe it’s where the market begins and ends, but maybe the key is the market itself, and that can’t be slipped into a pocket. Thus, you can’t say for sure that the market’s limits are reachable in the first place. Walls make up the market, of course, but its existence rests upon none of them.

Everything grows, doesn’t it? Trees grow, grass grows. Children grow, faster than you could ever imagine. Life expectancy is growing – how couldn’t it? The average life span – that’s great! Though it is growing less for men than for women. And the number of healthy years lived could grow faster, too. Cases of chronic illnesses are growing along with it. The growth of cancer patients is constant. Luckily, the rate of recoveries is growing as well. And yet, when you’re healthy, you stare out the window and think about rising dangers, floods, the frequency of every imaginable environmental catastrophe in general, the strength of storms, the speed of winds. There’s no point even mentioning growing prices, of course. Eggs cost more today than they did yesterday. Milk costs more. Sometimes prices don’t grow, but spike. They rise like lifts in skyscrapers. Somewhere, someone’s profits are growing because for others, for people like me, bills are growing. The bills tower overhead. I can’t say how long I’ll manage to keep this apartment. I should start doing what everybody’s been talking about: cutting back, shrinking.
But no, don’t get me wrong – the apartment is nice. Fantastic location. It’s got my recommendation! Beautiful floors, just gorgeous. Old, sound beams running across the ceiling. I’m sure we can come to an agreement if you’re interested!

Dust and I had an agreement. Seeing as how it’s adept at dividing (an enviable ability) and likes to collect everywhere, I offered to grant it total dominion over one room where it can do whatever it pleases. To relinquish one part of my apartment to it, even though I could easily use the space as a guest room. Something I could rent out for a minor monthly monetary bonus. Or a place for a friend to stay, as I’m not in dire need of money. Not to say there couldn’t always be more of it. In any case, I told the dust to move into that room and leave me alone, because I’m sick of dealing with you day in, day out. It seemed to take me up on my offer at first, moving in and curling up into a comfortable ball. The dust hasn’t let me step foot in there for years. But do you think that was the end of it? Maybe for the dust, sure, but not for me. Dust is like a giant corporation or an aggressor – you strike a deal but it still finds ways to deceive you, outsmart you, overpower you somehow. I have to clean my apartment every day. Every day. They say the rats and cockroaches will survive a nuclear holocaust. I’m convinced that dust will, too, and it’ll even outlive the cockroaches and the rats. And the planet. The solar system. The whole universe. The future belongs to dust.