Humans Are Very Odd Indeed

Humans are very odd indeed.

I’ve seen many, and my observations can be summarized exactly that way: Humans are very odd. They make things overly complicated. They try to hide what should be exposed. They build walls. I do not understand why.

No, I’m not talking about a wall like me. I know my purpose. When I was first constructed in 1864, I was stuffed with old newspapers to help insulate against the harsh winters. My windows were given shutters that could open and close to let in or block out the light. I am a protection. I shield from the elements- from the wind and the rain and the rage of the summer heat and the sharpness of the cold.

No, I’m not talking about a wall like me. I’m talking about the walls they build around their minds and their hearts. You can see them in their eyes- erected in a second at the sound of a word or a particular voice. Too often they shut out those who belong inside. No, I do not understand why.

My last resident was an interesting specimen to observe. I watched her closely as she moved around in her petri dish. When she first came, she walked through with that same woman with the clipboard who showed me to anyone who wanted to see- walked them around my insides and opened me up. She was quiet and calm and she smiled when she noticed my little oddities. They shook hands and soon she started coming without the woman with the clipboard. Instead, she brought things like calk and thin, transparent curtains and paint cans. She painted me sage because she liked that it made her feel calm and she covered me in pictures of the places she had been. They are prints in various sizes but matching golden frames, and they decorate me like jewelry- like the little earrings that line her ears. The room is littered with plants- some potted and growing and some in vases, dying slow, beautiful deaths until their petals become stiff like paper. Oh, yes. Papers are everywhere. Don’t you see them? On the desk and next to the couch on the coffee table where there was always at least one mug. Books stacked on shelves. Post-it notes scrawled with things she didn’t want to forget but most always did.

When she first came, there were many people with her. They were carrying in boxes and furniture. They were laughing. But as the night wore on, I was surprised that they all filed out, and she was left alone. But she did not look lonely. One after another, they shut the door behind them. This house is not very small. A young girl alone. Perhaps she was considered a woman already, but she was a girl. You could see it in her eyes. They were excited. They still held hope.

She would go around scribbling things, and then there would be more paper. She watered her plants and she spoke to them. She would talk on the phone. She held dinner parties and she laughed and drank whole bottles of wine. And sometimes he would come by, and they would talk, and they would laugh. Neither was particularly funny, but they laughed at everything. If she wasn’t laughing, he would make faces at her so that she would. He liked to listen to her laugh. He liked to listen to her even when he was tired. She was never tired- not when he was around. He listened as she rambled, and she clung to every word that he said. I watched her eyes as she looked at him. They got soft on the sides, but they shone like a light was switched on behind. He could not look at them for too long because he felt them looking into his soul. She looked into his soul because she loved him and everything she found inside. He did not like for her to look into his soul because he loved her but he did not love himself and he did not like everything he found inside. He did not like most things he found inside.

One day I watched his walls come down. It did not last long, but you could see the stones cascading down in his eyes. You could see them pool in the corners as he spoke. He looked relieved- like he could breathe a little better.

And then one day he never came again. I don’t know when it changed, but I know when she noticed.

I observed my girl. I watched her pass through the stages of grief like she passed through the rooms of the house- sometimes slowly and sometimes running from one to the other and back again a hundred times a day. I watched her wilt like the flowers in the vases. I watched her die, slow and beautiful.

The dinner parties continued. She would put on her earrings and her mascara and run her hands down her dress. They would come in loud and excited, and they would eat. It looked the same until the doors closed for the last time. Then, behind her walls, her mascara would run with her mind until one stopped first and then the other. Months and months and months and years she lived just waiting until could close her eyes, and she would rest until she woke up wishing that she had not.

Then one day she didn’t.

That was when I saw him again. He was quiet- the way he was with everyone except for her. He moved slowly through the room, his eyes running over the pictures he had seen so many times from the couch. They were red and swollen. They were covered over with stone. His walls were stronger than ever, but beneath them his soul was broken. You could see it by the way he held himself- by the way his body moved.

He left her without saying goodbye. So did she.

The people came in to pack up her things. They took down the pictures and put them in boxes and carried out the sofa and the curtains and threw away the flowers. Even the lavender bushels that had stiffened and still smelled like the provinces of France. They threw those away, too.

“I thought she was happy,” one said, shaking her head.

“So did I,” another replied.

“If walls could talk,” someone else said. He shook his head and began to cry.

If walls could talk…

If I could talk, would I answer them? Would I tell them that they had only to step inside to see behind her walls? Would I tell them how many times I watched her cry? Would I tell them that, in her own way, she told them a thousand times the truth but that they did not see it?

No, I don’t think I would. Maybe they tried to see and she did not let them. Maybe they tried many times.

No, if I could talk, if I could say only one thing, I would ask them both: “Why did you do it? Why did you build your walls?”

Already I know his answer and I know hers. They would say, “To keep me safe.”

And I would reply, “But did they?”

To which they would say: “No. No, they did not.”