A home with two rooms

A wise man left written on the back of a receipt that there are three things you simply cannot do in life. One is to get a waiter to see you before he decides to do so. Another is to defraud the phone company - if anyone is going to defraud it'll be them, not you. And the third is to go back home.

You might think, 'Bah, I can do that anytime,' but you must understand that by 'home' the wise man meant your original one and by 'go back' he referred to inhabiting that place like you used to. The house might still belong to your family, and if you're lucky, your parents might still be there. But once you leave, you just can't return. You can visit, at Christmas or in summer holidays, you can plant a tree in the back garden and help paint the fence, you can enjoy a Sunday roast or inherit the house itself. It doesn't matter what you do; you simply can't go back ever again. That home is gone, wiped from the face of the earth, swallowed by a tornado. It actually vanished behind your back shortly after the first time you left. Like me, you might be used to storms or other forms of desolation. The problem is, at times, some act as if that home still exists, even if it was long ago sold, even if those who were their family are strangers or dead. But even if the house stands, even if they are all alive, cordial and still there, the wise man knew nobody could go back home anyway.

You and I like to test sometimes if we could go mad and at the beginning of the plague we decided we would get lost for a good while. We succeeded. None of our friends could find us for more than a year. We hid, we read and we talked. We stared at the sea for countless hours, and swam, even when it was too cold to do so. We walked up and down the same hills and ate the same way over and over. Surprisingly, we didn't end up mad, but we did something worse: we went back home, when I knew we couldn't.

Let me tell you what happens when you do something you simply cannot do. It is a secret that only the wise man and I know. Imagine a wooden cuckoo clock the size of a deer's head hanging on the wall. You see it? Now, imagine you fold it and put it in your pocket. That's how it works: you act against natural laws and the door opens for strange things to happen to you and to life as you knew it. 

It wasn't an accident: unconsciously we chose it. It couldn't have been any other way. So we went back home, remember? We crossed the gates and found plants growing in the drought. There was a perfect meal coming out of an empty kitchen. There was a loving hug from a heartless mother. There was the most spectacular library gathered by a man that didn't read. The pictures on the wall either broke or broke us, so we put them away. The fruit was not for us to touch, but for the ants to spoil. The closet had no room for our clothes. Everything was mismatched and the boiler stopped boiling. There were many beds, and nowhere to sleep. Towels were carefully ironed but our records were unmercifully torn into pieces.

We had nothing, yet the trash kept piling up as some sort of multiplication miracle. We woke up every day unable to remember how we got there. Time spin-dried at 800 rpm, we must not change the washing program. We must not change anything, we must not be. But we were. Erased, frightened. And we were, there, until the day we didn't mind the ants or the cold water and managed to fill the kitchen and get our heads around the plants growing despite the drought. We were there until the day we didn't miss our records or our clothes. That day we looked at the man in his library and it made sense. The breaking pictures were not breaking us. We stayed until we understood that the heartless mother was just 11 years old.

We went back home and left again. We learnt we needed a room of one's own, so I made mine and you did the same. Now we know we don't have a home but that we are one. A home with two rooms. And life carried on, wider.