Tales from the Archives: Welcome Home

Over the years, I've written endless words that remained invisible to others. Often, I've just needed to Get It Out and Put It Down. They're the raw, the unedited, the unfiltered. 

I've done this so many times, I've unintentionally created an Archives of the Unseen. These ramblings have been orphaned in numerous places: the Notes App on my iPhone. My email Drafts folder. Tattered notebooks. Barely-used journals. 

As I've started working on new writings and finding my way back to sharing and creating, I've revisited these archives. It's stirred up a lot of nostalgia and memories and, as always, fEELiNgS.

I've decided to share these old words of mine that still feel evergreen, even if they are a snapshot of a specific time in my life or version of myself that has evolved. 

​This one comes from the Drafts folder of my Gmail account. Originally written in 2020. 
​
xo, Lindsay


My heart is a house with many rooms. After awhile, it's a place where I open the door and welcome you in.

You can take your coat off.
You can't keep your shoes on.
You don't have to feel bad that Daisy is barking when you walk through the door. She does that with everyone.

"Make your room your own," I say. Paint it red. Paint it blue. Put up the picture in the frame. The one with the inspirational quote, or the aerial view of the baseball stadium, or that California beach where you went that one time. The sunset is pretty.

Come upstairs. Courtney's room is pinks and grays and wing-back chairs she got at the Freeland Walleye Festival. My mom constantly apologizes that hers is not clean enough. My aunt Terry has paintings from an art fair, pictures from China, books from Barnes & Noble. Ryan has his deer antlers hanging on the wall. Daisy has a queen-size bed all to herself and a bunch of chewed up bones and mangled Lamb Chop toys missing an eye or a leg or its overall, you know, shape.
 
And that’s just one hallway.

The rooms go on and on. People I love. People I've loved. 

There's other rooms, too. They're empty now. They used to have curtains. They used to have frames with pictures of smiling faces in the middle. 
They carved their names in the floorboards.
They drilled holes in the walls.
They spilled their guts on the carpet. It left a stain.

I thought they’d settle in here. Thought the house smell would seep into their clothes, their nostrils, their lungs so they didn’t even notice when they walked in the door anymore. Thought they'd put down this address as their permanent place of residence.

But it turns out my heart isn’t always a home. It’s an apartment with a month to month lease. We're on borrowed time and we don't even know it. 

Our hearts all have empty chambers. Where people leave items like artifacts, seared forever into memory. They may move out, but that doesn't mean they weren't here. 

Sometimes, I put my key in the locks. Open the door, walk in the rooms, hear the empty echoes and see the dancing shadows. I lay on the rug. Stare at the ceiling fan. Watch it whirl around, stirring up the dust and shaking loose the memories that unhinge like the door. I think of the one that lived here...just for a little while. 

I don't demolish the room. I don't paint over the colors. I don't lock the door. I open the window and let the fresh air in. Then, I walk out.

I go back down the hallway. I put fresh flowers in the vases on the shelves on the walls of the rooms that are occupied. I glance around. Soak it in. 

Despite the obvious wear and tear of years of love and loss, the bones are still good here. The foundation is steady. It's held up by the bricks laid by the ones who have lived here for decades. The ones who know I listen to Taylor Swift while I make tacos, and need to get a real Christmas tree, and have gotten used to the fact that I use half of the bottle of ketchup at the restaurant. 

They aren't just stopping by. They're staying. I've even made them a key.

​And later, when I'm in the kitchen and say "Dinner's ready," I am never sitting alone at the table.