#Scurf129: The introvert's dream
On the unearthed, imagined beauty of other people's houses
“There is an ache in my heart for the imagined beauty of a life I haven't had, from which I had been locked out, and it never goes away.”
- Robert Goolrick
One of my many childhood obsessions that has not left my side till now, is the beauty of places I don’t fully know (yet). The back side of doors. The inner world of other people’s houses. The cervices between the window panes and sills. The dark spaces between the decades old couch and the floor. The slip of jagah between the godrej almirah and the wall. The scribbles on the walls left by a three year old who once stayed back for a night. The drawers and drawers worth of thingamajigs inside bathrooms. The lower two shelves of the chest that sits in the space between two doors leading in and out of the same room.
The dressing table drawers! Oh THE DRESSING TABLE DRAWERS — a life’s worth of sustenance in there. Chipped lipsticks, broken compacts, expired face masks. Cups of homemade kajal. You want to look and look and look!
The pages, scripts, bills, tickets unsullied, sleeping quietly between leaves of newspaper sheets that line the shelves of almirahs. Behind curtains are hidden those Charmis jars, the ponds glass jars, metallic containers for safety pins, old spice bottles. A smell hangs in the air.
As a kid I lived to linger in the shelves of these spaces. To hover around, over them. Breathing in their dusty, earthy scent. I loved it (and still do) when I was home alone, exploring, fingering through reams and reams of things that other people assumed were mundane. These are never just “things” to me. They are a life’s worth of accumulation, a way of placemaking, showing for years’ worth of living.
The quotidian attracted me then. The quotidian attracts me now. The thrill of scraping through an old shelf with moth-eaten fabrics, kept ever so safely for future, better use, now sitting there patiently gathering poignance over decades. Yellowed pages of diaries kept so safely for use for something special. But nothing ever occasioned it.
The unwitting romance of other people’s things, whispering bittersweet nothings each time I pass by. Combs, bobby pins, cups, pens, broken pencils, battered erasers. There is magic to be found in this everyday assemblage. A deliriousness, ever. Something improbable, often akin to missed connections. Difficult gifts, gathered things and unexpected collections.
They invite me endlessly, creating a dictionary of imaginary experiences I could have had. In that, they heal me. Labyrinthine artefacts of a life, or several lives, patch me back together. This obsession keenly satiates me, helps me situate myself within the milieu of the present, while thinking carefully, simultaneously also of all the lives I left behind, didn’t live, ignored.
The illicit lives of other people, being lived behind doors, windows, curtains and muffled phone speakers. The reality of it all. Lying somewhere among the smattering of these so called “things”. The way we ignore them also speaks to us. They are not just things. They are the detritus of a well lived-in life. A deliciousness to the drama that these things conceal, never fully revealing their everyday nature, but giving a close peek nonetheless.
Perhaps this is all inside an introvert's dream, or a writer’s. Or it’s just that we’re messed up flakes, looking for various ways to resolve childhood issues.
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