She found herself perpetually neither here nor ‘there’. A living lacuna. Though she didn’t know where ‘there’ was. She mused it consisted of something akin to other dimensions, the after-life, whatever enlightened state monks belonged to; some vast hollow behind the mirror of everyday. A feeling nagged at her that she might suddenly wake up, snap out of it—it being ‘here’—and find herself ‘there’—alone, in a land of unfamiliar, strange, nothingness. A nothingness that rang true to the core of everything and of which the thought sucked air from her lungs. Every day, she walked through the same life, reasoning to herself that there was no logical reason to doubt it. Despite it, something always bit back, turning her stomach and pulling the rug out from under. ‘I just want to feel ‘here’, please’, she murmured repeatedly. ‘Please, oh please, just let me be ‘here’’.
Yet, as ‘here’ is an infinitesimally evolving state, 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 doorway, and was insensibly changing, 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 that I can see outside of—so that I am always residing ‘here’. Just a place that I can be, a place I can take everywhere, a place where I can 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, their materiality left back in time.
And some she didn’t really know at all.