Our Little House
First published in Landfall 244 (Spring 2022)
We pack up our belongings and get ready
to leave our little house. It is not really ours
and it is not really a house, but a poet I love
once said there is a difference between fact and truth.
In our little house, the walls are bright blue.
We have a third-hand couch the colour of burnt orange
that somehow, despite meeting the criteria, manages to fall
just shy of achieving 70s vintage chic.
In our little house, it’s just us,
for the first time. And then it’s just us and the cat.
Here, we talk about what we want to happen to us
when we die and whether having children is selfish
given the current global environmental and political situation.
Here, we name all of the neighbourhood cats ourselves
and report back on who we see when we are out. Here,
the landlord pushes a box of chocolates through the cat door every christmas.
Here, we spend the weekends scrubbing the walls
and cabinets with Exit Mould. Here, from the safety of our little house,
we watch the world end in loud, routine ways.
This is where we live when I get the diagnosis.
Where, on instruction from my psychologist, we unpick
ourselves and see it how it really is. The thread pulled and left tangled.
Where we are both, finally, undone and bearing
witness to the whole damn thing.
We have been in our little house for nearly three years and soon,
we will move to my grandmother’s old house in the suburbs.
We will have a dishwasher and a garage and a garbage disposal.
We will see the ocean every day. We will buy a brand new couch.
We will leave behind the restless noise of our discovery.
The rambling messiness of the beginning of our life.
But, say you would do it all again.
Despite the mould and the leaks.
The pneumonia and the stolen tools – say it.
Even when we wake on winter mornings and the walls sparkle
with wet. The curtains billowing as the wind passes
through the gaps in the closed door. Even when the upstairs
neighbours yell and throw dishes. When they put their washing machine on
and the whole house quivers,
the glasses earthquaking in the cupboard.
Say you would do it again—for us.
Sitting among it, unravelled,
bare. Our most honest, naked selves.