The Yellow House

by Sarah M. Broom

From the beginning, no one could agree on what to call the place. But namelessness is a form of naming.

And then you see the lives of the children and they become the living people of the house, the house lives in them. They become the house instead of the house becoming them. When I look at you all, I don’t really see the house, but I see what happened from the house. And so in that way, the house can’t die.

Remembering is a chair that it is hard to sit still in.

“One important reason to travel the world is so you know how to speak about things,” I wrote in a notebook. “So that there exists in one’s mind a system of comparison so that one can realize, finally, and most importantly, that it is true: no one thing exists unto itself and that is finally, I suppose, why I came here.”

I believed then, and to some degree still believe now, that even at their best, houses were perpetually in a state of entropy. It was just gravity doing its work.