The House of Leaves and Strangers

There is an empty space I inhabit with no walls and no furniture. At first it is aggressively white but as I scramble in the blinding lightness of what it’s emptiness feels like, the seething brightness suddenly vanishes and I’m left groping in the dark, floating in the nothingness like a spider at the centre of a vacant web. It is strange to know that an outline of a structure exists whilst being suspended in the structureless chaos of its middle. Yes, I am here in my infinite yet somehow finite web, legs and arms outstretched like a limp Christ praying I touch the edges of something - anything - solid. To have such vicious uncertainty nailed through my wrists like this is not so pleasant, but I wear my thorn crown like a good girl and laugh because everyone loves a joker, until the rhythm of the joke falls away  like a wounded swallow from the sky. Funny really, how a joke hits the ground with a deafening thud, revealing the entrails of what it was trying to hide.

And when the laughter melts away what is left? Sometimes, a reverberating sense of stagnation and yet there’s always direction to our movements. After all if you’re scrambling towards what you believe is something then you’re technically progressing, somehow.

To talk of life in this abstraction seems strange when my world is so tangible and full of noise and touch and motion. Yet I cannot shake the feeling that it is all acted out, that my reality, like all reality, is no more solid than water and suddenly the electric vibrancy of the paint I’ve spent so long configuring on the page starts to run in the torrents of this fluidity.

It is true; I am liminal, lacustrine, transitioning, cusping, riverine, smoke trails in the wind and there is beauty in how little of a oneness I am, but with beauty comes terror and with love comes fear. The paradox then is that everything is so full and empty at the same time and with that paradox comes guilt; why isn’t all of this enough? And that’s a question that can only be answered by turning inwards, for everything external becomes an outline if you cannot find fullness within.

So let’s go back to that room, that house of the self with no furniture inside it.

You’re in a corridor now, all white of course, but this time there’s a glorious vermillion chair you can see in the distant horizon, shimmering like a promise of stability. You walk towards the chair because you’ve been waiting years for it to appear and you walk and walk and walk towards it because it whispers “sit on me, sit on me, rest, at last, be still.” But as you get closer to the chair it folds like hot honey into the floor and you scramble trying to grab it but it’s melted into the white surface and you’re left again in this unending house to walk around. Do you lie down or do you keep walking? Remember the light - it is LED electric white bright light meaning you can lie down but you won’t sleep. So I’ll ask again - do you lie down or do you just keep going?

Now what I haven’t told you, (which might influence your choice to keep going) is that there are rooms that appear within this house

where shamrock tendrils grow from the walls to form a forest of willow trees whose weeping leaves caress you. Sometimes they grow at such a pace that you can hardly see through them to the emptiness on the other side and you hold them and hang to them and feel ever so safe. Would you keep plodding through the loneliness knowing then that you’d be ever so surrounded and ever so embraced?

I would, I do - I keep walking away from confronting those empty rooms because I love being held ever so much. Each tendril is a friend or lover of mine - holding me, wrapping me up, guiding me - reminding me I am fire and petals and rain.

But then I look out beyond the fullness of the forest that grows around me and see the glaring vacancy staring back at me like an angry beast with yellow eyes. It is in moments like these where I ask whether all this fullness is just a distraction - whether all these lovers have been shaping forces for my confused desire, as lovers so often are just that - mirrors for who we want to be and then more hauntingly, mirrors for who we actually are.

And so you heal your broken heart by telling yourself that your lovers never really understood you but in truth, you never really understood yourself. So perhaps it is the case that we all stroll these empty rooms within us, walking around as strangers to ourselves.

What does this mean though - to be a stranger to the self? One only needs to watch the news to see how fearful we are of the “foreign other” but what if that external other is an otherness within you, a phobia of the foreigner without because it reminds you of a foreigner within? What then does this say about xenophobes and what happens when the sanctity of the self is broken and those borders we knew ourselves by turn to nothing but ash and mud? Maybe we fear our strangeness and the empty rooms within ourselves because we fear not understanding something fully - which is natural as we are taught that “always knowing” is power whilst “not knowing” is weakness or ignorance.

What if the reverse were true and we’ve been getting it wrong all along? That actually the power lies with those capable of sitting in uncertainty, embracing the unknown as a friend rather than a foe. Maybe then the emptiness was not a horror house but rather the blankness was a creative space for experimentation and newness - a tabula rasa of the self.

I have lived so much, so deeply, so electrically that I am much too scrawled to ever be erased and you my friend are a book of turning pages and running ink where margins flow like rivers. Perhaps then, it is ok for us to feel empty and full as we sit here tossed between the vying forces of darkness and light, endlessly, perpetually evolving.

***really Yeats’ theory of turning gyres together with Blake’s thesis/anti thesis/synthesis thread so wanted to capture this in a way that also seemed true to my style. Seemingly this starts out fucking bleak but captures that really valid fear of not knowing or feeling lost but finds a sense of peace or resolution by the end. I suppose that’s what writing should do, almost like maths, it is a working out and working through of a problem to some resolve***