She found herself perpetually neither here nor ‘there’. A living lacuna. Though she didn’t know where ‘there’ was. Perhaps something akin to other dimensions, the afterlife; some vast hollow behind the mirror of everyday. A feeling nagged at her that she might suddenly wake up, snap out of ‘here’, and find herself ‘there’—alone in a land of innominate lack. Where nothingness rang true to the core and sucked air from her lungs. Every day, she walked through the same life, reasoning that there were no grounds to doubt it. Though something always bit back, turning her stomach and tugging her feet. ‘I just want to feel ‘here’, please’, she murmured repeatedly.
Yet, the moments when she thought she was stepping through ‘here’’s doorway, she found herself facing back out to the street she’d come from. ‘There’ rolling closer like a thunder cloud. Every day she stepped through hundreds of doors.
Eventually, she realized that if ‘here’ existed through a tricked doorway she would be forever running in and out of houses, attempting to be in the right one.
‘I need a house’, she decided, that has no door, and is not really a house at all. One I can see outside of so I never have to leave. Just a place that I can be, take everywhere, feel at home, ‘here’.
And so, she went to the Parts of Self and she asked:
‘I would like you to build me a house. I don’t mind if it’s pretty, I would just like it to function. It’s function is to keep me ‘here’, always.’
And so, the Parts of Self went to work, each with their own proposal. Some of the parts she recognized with familiar warmth, others with cold knowing; some were ghosts, weight bearing transparency.
And some she didn’t really know at all.