The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

I had done something out of the ordinary. I’d behaved like a normal person. I’d stopped conforming to others. And, however it all ended up, I knew I would never regret that.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s forget about that you, the one living in the mirror.” “Are you saying he is not me?” “He is. But not quite. He is you seen through the lens of your image of yourself. We all look worse in the mirror than we actually are, didn’t you know that?”

So it wasn’t about the clothes at all, it was about Sphinx. About his self-esteem.

If you sat without moving for hours, Nature would include you in its cycle just like another tree. Leaves would cling to your roots, birds would alight on your branches and crap down your shirt, rain would wash down your furrows, and wind would bury you in sand.

sooner or later we always run into problems stemming from things left unsaid. From one of us being misunderstood.

when words have been spoken they always have a meaning, even if you didn’t mean it when you spoke them.”

“What for you means nothing can be everything for someone else.

Everyone chooses his own House. It is we who make it interesting or dull, and only then does it start working trying to change us.

Go on wheels, but never mention it.

It is not easy to just abandon a dream. Much easier to complicate the road to it than to accept that it could never be achieved.

That’s when I realize that I probably need this conversation even more than he does. Because no one ever asks you about obvious things. Or things that seem obvious.

The oak shuffles from root to root and shifts so that we end up in its shadow. Of course, it might just be the sun moving in the sky. But I prefer to think it’s the oak.

It’s her most incredible feature, that limitless capacity for empathy, for picking up someone else’s mood, for dissolving into thin air when that’s what is needed.

She’s ready to spend hours listening to anyone who’d have an urge to unburden themselves in her company. This to me is her most unusual quality, one the least

The Cages are conducive to introspection, unless you’re stuck there for too long. The longer you sit in them, the harder it becomes not to give in to fear, and that kicks all the thoughtfulness right out of your head.

“I’m thinking how the same story comes out completely differently depending on who’s telling it. And for all that, none of you is really lying.” “Because whoever’s telling the story creates the story. No single story can describe reality exactly the way it was.

When you’re little you imagine the grown-ups to be these flawless beings. And then you learn that it isn’t so.” “Sometimes you learn it not only about the grown-ups,”

When, despite your complete certainty that you’re ugly, someone still manages to fall in love with you,

That happens a lot. The knowledge sits inside you somewhere, and you don’t notice it until something shakes you up, and then you understand it’s exactly what you’ve been waiting for. But you still won’t know why that is.

“You see,” he says, “life does not go in a straight line. It is like circles on the surface of the water. Every circle, every loop is composed of the same stories, with very few changes, but no one notices that. No one recognizes those stories. It is customary to think that the time in which you find yourself is brand new, freshly made and freshly painted. But the world only ever draws repeated patterns. And there aren’t that many of them.” “But what does this old junk have to do with that?” He sighs, visibly hurt. “It has to do with the sea, for example, always bringing up the same things that are nevertheless always different. If this time you got a twig, it doesn’t mean that the last time it wasn’t a seashell. A wise man brings all of it together, puts it with what’s been collected by those who came before him, and then adds to it the stories of what came up in the olden days. And this way he would know what the sea brings.”

The longer you spend somewhere, the more there are things around you that need to be thrown out, but when you move to a new place you never take all that trash with you, which means that it belongs more to the place than to the people, because it never moves, and in each new place a person finds scraps of someone else, while transferring the possession of his own scraps to whoever moves into his previous place, and this goes on everywhere and all the time.