I remember the first time she stepped inside me with shoes still on, apology already forming before her heel touched my floors. She always (and only) apologizes to things that cannot hear her. Doors. Cars. Sides of the CPU when there's a lag.
She stood in the center of my living room with the solemnity of someone entering a temple she footed with her bloodstream.
Endless documents - application, inspections, fixes, fees, letters still live in her email like unslept ghosts. I could smell the bureaucratic panic clinging to her, the kind that comes from signing your name so many times it stops feeling like ownership and
starts feeling like confession.
A cage.
She hates cages, she hates structure. Not structure from routine, but structure that exists because it's a norm. Structure that she doesn't approve of. Like Marriage.
A cage.
Marriage, she says, is signing your soul off to the Satan named society.
She walked my perimeter that day like she was mapping a new country and simultaneously checking for sinkholes.
She had been here before, through the course of the touring and inspections. Came in with a tape measuring my walls, end to end, taking down the measurements clumsily - half in her Whatsapp personal chat, the other on a teensy scribbling pad and some on her arm. Like she was going to remember which is which. "I know what I'm noting down" she claimed smugly.
She touched my walls like pulse points. She hated the blue almost grey whites the previous owners had chosen to coat the place just to put it on the market. She says it reminds her of the base coat that goes on before the actual shade. Like the peticoat of her granny's saree that she washes with neel detergent liquid. Like hospital walls screaming for color.
Cage.
Later she would paint them in colors she insisted were "neutral" but were, in fact, emotionally defensive. Warm enough to look alive. Pale enough to never commit to being remembered.
She built a closet inside my ribs with the fragile arrogance of someone who had never held a power drill but believed deeply in YouTube tutorials and late-night determination. She loved tearing down the old frames. A veteran of paper cuts, she confidently started to yank the bearings off with the strength of a mouse and the courage of a naive deer trying to befriend a lioness only to find mysterious bruises all over from frames that seemed to have no rough edges.
She measured the paint pints twice and still got barely enough for a single coat, which she laughed about in a way that sounded suspiciously like relief that imperfection could be repaired with wall hanging mirrors and cheap decor from home depot.
I watched her line my shelves, first with wallpaper. She gave up thrice as she yelled that wallpapers were a conspiracy while disentangling herself from the sticky sheets. Then, with relics of elsewhere. Miniature elephants that had survived USBP Customs more easily than her emotions.
Ticket stubs that had lost their ink but not their authority. Trinkets, plushies, shot glasses purchased in cities where she never drank, preferring instead to let them stand like glass soldiers guarding proof that she once left and returned successfully.
She designed me a movie room as if she were constructing a sanctioned space for alternate lives. She positioned the convertible couch with the precision of someone who wanted the screen to feel close enough to believe but far enough to escape from. She tested acoustics with the free vinyl player cum Bluetooth speaker she won using her company's rewards portal and a karaoke mic that was returned to amazon faster than it took to get delivered.
She put a shiny disco ball (that she scavenged the lengths of the state to obtain from a GenZ vintage store) in the corner and a spot light underneath. She claimed it was for ambience, but clearly it was to hide the mirror that was her face, as she watched her favorite movies indoors. Her favorite form of escapism outside of reading, a hobby she had fallen out of love with in the recent years. Or so I've heard her say as she arranged three large U-haul boxes worth of books borrowed or stolen from free libraries, facebook marketplace, and gifted by well meaning friends.
She watched a few films in this home theatre - Films she had already memorized front to back, mouthing dialogues slightly ahead of the actors like she was correcting their delivery.
Sometimes she watches tragedies there and laughs at scenes that are not meant to be funny. Sometimes she pauses romantic scenes midway, stands up, reorganizes pillows, runs to wash her hands for the nth time, checks her phone, returns, rewinds, rewatches, as if calibrating emotional volume.
At night she moves through me with her fuzzy warm socks, and her footsteps carry the hesitant confidence of someone who still expects the rental company to call and say there has been a clerical error and she must vacate her own life by Thursday.
She arranges each relic and each furniture the way one arranges chess pieces in a game played against memory. She gets irked when her mates check the pieces out and don't place them EXACTLY WHERE THEY BELONG. In the small dust free shape that's left behind where they were picked from.
She places fairy lights and tea-light candles in corners like surveillance devices for loneliness. She keeps all big personality lights off. At night, the space seems like it's hosting a coven of witches about to perform a ouija service. Dark, silent, softly lit with flickering candles.
Sometimes she stands in my kitchen holding a bag of frozen salmon she bought with nutritional optimism and eats her usual yogurt bowl instead.
She scrolls through conversations that ended years ago, that she revives from the archives folder of her gmail, with the reverence of someone revisiting archaeological sites.
She laughs here. Loud. Real.
The kind that makes my ceiling vibrate in approval.
She also fights loud like a child prone to tantrums until it ends in tears and then she cries, like a wailing widow.
She also goes still here in ways that make my walls lean inward slightly, the way forests lean during storms they cannot prevent.
She drifts. Often.
I have learned to recognize when she leaves without leaving.
Her body remains seated, usually near the living room couch where afternoon light interrogates dust particles into confession, but her gaze begins to focus on distances that do not exist within my square footage. Her fingers sometimes curl like they are remembering another gravity.
She returns abruptly. Always.
Like someone startled awake in a theater after dreaming inside someone else's dream.
When she returns, she looks around at me the way survivors look at shorelines - relieved, confused, slightly betrayed by safety.
She confirms my counters have been wiped clean with ritualistic discipline, as if outward tidiness could negotiate with inward turmoil, chaos.
She puts spices in discrete repurposed nut butter jars, organizes them into a catalogue, the index to which lives only in her mind. Yet she uses them emotionally rather than sequentially.
On the beds and couches that overflow with pillows and linen, she demands blankets be folded with an artistic precision, and yet she collapses into them sideways like a comma in a sentence she is not ready to finish.
I hold her routines. I cradle her collected evidence that she is building something that does not evaporate when morning arrives.
But I also watch her pause in doorways like she is waiting for someone to walk through behind her, someone who exists only in the draft between memory and muscle reflex.
I have sheltered her moods, her aches, ambitious grocery hauls, abandoned hobby equipment, impulsive amazon purchases, and several versions of her that she believes were temporary but have quietly applied for permanent residency.
I contain her stability. I contain her rehearsals of catastrophe. I contain her quiet negotiations with a past that still occasionally knocks without using the doorbell.
And sometimes, when she stands in my center again, the same way she did on the first day, spinning slowly like she is trying to confirm I am still real, I want to ask her something.
Not whether she is happy.
Homes are not naive enough to ask that. I want to ask:
Are you building a sanctuary, or are you constructing a museum for a life you are still not certain you chose?
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