When A House Disappears

There used to be a house in this picture. Between that holly tree and the monstrous ugly building in the background stood a little perfect house that I used to live in. I only lived there for three years, but they were huge years. Suddenly the space that so much happened in is completely gone. Eerily gone like it disappeared and is now baffling people in a different dimension why this house suddenly appeared there. Perhaps it has killed a witch.

My memories of the house begin before I lived there. The owners of the house and my best friend and I stayed up all night several nights in a row to watch the 2000 FIFA World Cup. We tried taking naps between matches if they had time between them, but either they were at eleven at night or three in the morning because they were in South Korea and Japan.

I would go to work early in the morning on no sleep. I worked in a hardware store.

Brazil ended up winning and I could finally sleep.

I moved in not that much longer after that. I lived in the basement. That is now dirt. I used to smoke in my room. There was a gas hot water heater around the corner. I miss smoking inside.

During that era I had insomnia, so friends knew that they could come over and I’d be awake ready to sit on the porch and smoke cigarettes.

My roommate and I were driving to some guys house in Lake Oswego. She for some reason was telling me that she unconditionally loved me. It startled me. Not that anyone said they loved me, but that I believed her, and that I felt the same way. I watched a million strings that were tied to my love float to the earth. She was one of my groomspeople at my wedding.

One time the basement flooded and I lost a bunch of my old journals. I wonder often what it would be like to read those. Sometimes I think I am better off not reliving the horrors that was my mid twenties brain.

My other roommate worked at Stumptown and she liked going out and eating good food with friends. I would lovingly call her a whore. I even installed a red light bulb over her bedroom door.

The house had only one bathroom, and to get to it I had to either go through one woman’s room or the other woman’s room. Sometimes I chose wrong.

Every Sunday night a group of people would come over and watch HBO shows like Sex in the City, OZ, the Wire, Six Feet Under, and the Sopranos. I started watching with them when I overheard a character on Six Feet Under say, “I love you David Fisher”.

It was around this time that I began to watch baseball again. A few friends and I would watch baseball there or at one of the bars on Hawthorne. While I lived in that house, the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, the Florida Marlins, and the Boston Red Sox before I moved to another place.

After I moved out of that house, several of my closest friends moved away and I spent many years with a hole inside of me. Some of them I remained close to while others drifted away. It felt like it took a decade to recover from that loss.

I went to Spain while living in that house.

I got fired while living in that house.

Several of my friends sat down with me when I was at my darkest to confront me on my honesty and mental health. I have never felt that low again and I can honestly say all those friends saved my life.

One time I was sitting on the front porch at 6 in the morning smoking a cigarette and a friend drove on the driveway and held up a credit card and yelled, “It’s my birthday, and my dad wants to pay for us to see titties!” We went to the Acropolis and ate biscuits and gravy at 7 in the morning. You could still smoke in bars.

One time my friend had drove me to my house so that he could get his cell phone and then we were gonna go play disc golf. He turned to me and said, “Could you get my phone? I’m really sore from Pilates.”

There are stories that I can’t repeat, or they can never translate in the written form. I was a young man then, 24 to 27. I didn’t understand myself or the world around me. I was so hungry for love and connection then. I was suffering from a tremendous amount of depression and delusion. I wanted so much to feel like I belonged. I made so many mistakes and while I don’t condone any of them, I am glad I made them. I am the man today because of the boy I was then.

A friend was going to an emotional treatment center. He wanted to treat his insanity with love and relationships. He was supposed to go for three to six months. He was back in two weeks.

All these people stood in that house. They were a part of my life. We shared struggles and joys together. There are people that I will never forget and there are a lot people that only existed in that house.

There was a cat that lived there and during one extreme cold snap where it snowed for two days straight and then froze over, the cat didn’t come in. For days we wondered where that cat was. The cat was small. Some of us were certain the cat was frozen to death in the ivy under a foot of frozen snow while others were convinced that he was out there surviving. The snow thawed and the temperature rose, and that cat came back.

My roommate’s now husband once stayed a few weeks and learned French. He knew he was learning by reading the Little Prince in French.

There are stories that I probably forget. So much happened in a short period of time. I grew up. I decided to try in that house. I decided that I was worth it because literally a bunch of people loved me until I loved myself.

I hope someday my wife and I own a house that has an open door and people know they can come and be part of a family for an evening. I hope to be a maker of communities where people can learn love and compassion. I hope someday I can sit on a porch of my own and instead of feeling alone and in pain, I can look out into the world and feel whole. I hope I can have a home as wonderful as that house.

There was this guy that hung out with us that was from Texas. He was big and loud. He would come over uninvited, which was normal, but he would bang on the door loud and walk in and be excited to be doing something. He always wanted something to happen. Years later, after the three of us moved out and the house was sold, this big guy from Texas walked up those stairs and banged on the door and a woman who has never even seen us before opened the door and told him that we didn’t live there anymore. I wondered if he walked back down those stairs with his head hung low. The era was over.