The Staircase in the Woods

by Chuck Wendig

“Friendship is like a house,” she said to him, his head cradled in her lap. “You move into this place together. You find your own room there, and they find theirs, but there’s all this common space, all these shared places. And you each put into it all the things you love, all the things you are. Your air becomes their air. You put your hearts on the coffee table, next to the remote control, vulnerable and beautiful and bloody. And this friendship, this house, it’s a place of laughter and fun and togetherness too. But there’s frustration sometimes. Agitation. Sometimes that gets big, too big, all the awful feelings, all that resentment, building up like carbon monoxide. Friendship, like a house, can go bad, too. That air you share? Goes sour. Dry rot here, black mold there, and if you don’t remediate, it just grows and grows. Gets bad enough, one or all of you have to move out. And then the place just fucking sits there, abandoned. Empty and gutted. Another ruin left to that force in the world that wants everything to fall apart. You can move back into a place like that, sometimes. But only if you tear it all down and start again.”

Time to not be alone, she thought. Time to go home.

All for one, one for all, united we stand, divided we fall, nobody gets left behind, when you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way, word is bond. Or what’s the one from The Outsiders? If we don’t have each other, we don’t have anything.

“Shit. Getting old is stupid.”

was always just words, but that whole thing about sticks and stones was a lie. Words hurt as bad as a fist. Maybe worse.

But someone cuts you with words? Calls you names, tells you how little they think of you? That bypasses all your armor. A razor sliding across the meat of your heart.

“Hell gets talked about like it’s this bad place, a realm of agony and suffering put upon the sinner for having dared to sin. But that’s not what Hell is. Hell is not a place, or a presence. Hell is an absence. Hell is the place where God will not see you. It’s where you go when you’re so sure you cannot believe in him that you place yourself out of his sight, where you hide from him in the darkness. It’s about breaking that vital Covenant between God and man. It’s about refusing to believe there ever was a Covenant in the first place. Hell is broken promises. Hell is wandering outside of God’s sight, and away from his love. Hell is a choice.”

(But that, he supposed, was what it meant to be human. To exist in constant opposition to yourself, you as your very best friend at the exact same time you were your own worst enemy. Oh, how stupid it was to be a person.)

Emily Dickinson had written: Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.

“Friendship is like a house,” Lore finally managed to say, Owen’s head cradled in her lap. “You move into this place together. You find your own room there, and they find theirs, but there’s all this common space, all these shared places. And you each put into it all the things you love, all the things you are. Your air becomes their air. You put your hearts on the coffee table, next to the remote control, vulnerable and beautiful and bloody. And this friendship, this house, it’s a place of laughter and fun and togetherness, too.

But there’s frustration sometimes. Agitation. Sometimes that gets big, too big, all the awful feelings, all that resentment, building up like carbon monoxide. Friendship, like a house, can go bad, too. That air you share? Goes sour. Dry rot here, black mold there, and if you don’t remediate, it just grows and grows. Gets bad enough, one or all of you have to move out. And then the place just fucking sits there, abandoned. Empty and gutted. Another ruin left to that force in the world that wants everything to fall apart. You can move back into a place like that, sometimes. But only if you tear it all down and start again.”

friendship wasn’t a one-to-one deal, that you didn’t have to be all in every second of every relationship like that. People got to share different parts of themselves with different people.

We’re all really fucked up and just trying to get through life, and it’s better when we do it together instead of alone.

A house, at first, is not a home. At the start, a house is just a house: It is a structure designed for the purpose of someone to live in it. Perhaps you! You move in. You bring your things—all your most precious stuff. You pack into this place your whole life—and that effect is multiplicative. Life makes life, a fungal efflorescence of existence begetting existence. You bring in a spouse, you have more children, you get one pet, another pet, a dog and a cat and now a bearded dragon; it’s where you learn to cook and fill the house with wonderful smells; it’s where you rest your head and give birth to dreams that are ambitious and strange. And it is in all this that a house becomes a home: You imprint yourself upon it, and it imprints itself upon you in return. It becomes a part of your very identity—your house, your home, is part of the tapestry that is you. You carry it with you, in your heart, to the end of things. That, of course, is where the saying comes from: Home is where the heart is.

The other thing about a house—a home—is that it is a private place. It has walls. You can draw curtains over the windows. You can lock the door.

And in that place, you can be you and do whatever it is you want to do. You pig out on ice cream. You masturbate. You fuck. You sing in the shower. You take a shit multiple times a day. You watch the very worst of reality TV. You plunder the liquor cabinet. You talk absolute trash about people you know, people you work with, people you love, and others you hate.

This, too, is part of a house’s purview: a home away from prying eyes where you can finally drop the mask, lose the pretense, and be who you need to be. It is necessary and it is good.

Until, of course, it’s not.

That privacy also keeps hidden the fights you have. The cruel words, sharp as a tack, stuck in those you purportedly love. Your house is where you rage and punch drywall. Where families fight. Where relationships start to rot like fruit left long on the ground. It’s where kids l...

It’s where bad habits take root: too much drinking, too much eating, too many trips to the medicine cabinet, too much hoarding, too much sitting in the dark drunk-texting someone or trolling people on social media or flicking through the pics of an ex. Little seeds of neglect and pain, thumbed ...