In my dream there is a house. The house is standing in a field. The grass of the field is high, and a yellowish color that tall grass takes on summer days. It's a simple brick house, barely one story tall. The bricks are painted white, and the roof is tiled with red shingles in a two slant shape. It's a welcoming house, painted with the heat of the sun and with a warm embrace within. There is no meal waiting inside.
Instead, the house is warm, ready to embrace you. It's a welcoming house. Inside, there is only one small room. The floor is tiled with ceramic in yellowish and brown geometric patterns. The patterns come from far far ago, from memories inherited by ancestors. The walls are white inside, and so is the roof, but the windows are not. Each window is colored, painting the world inside in its own way. Opposite to the door, a magenta window paints the world with love and adoration, but also with anger and hatred. On the left wall, a yellow window paints the world with the pride of the sun, but also with betrayal and greed. And on the right wall, a cyan window paints the world in calm and wisdom, but also in sorrow and sadness.
There's no color in the house. The only way to see the world outside is through windows painted so hard that they nearly fall apart, windows so old that the spite that holds them is too strong to dispel. Only patches of color, given shape by a white sun high in an azure sky, are projected on the walls and on the floor. But the patches are not white, instead given bias by painted window panes. The house does no talk.
The house is empty. There is no one in the house, nor is there outside. All around, the field stretches its golden mane into eternity. The house has been destroyed before. People have escaped the house before. The house is now empty, for me to inhabit. It beckons, its green door open, its insides mellow. No one rebuilt the house. All those who did are now dead, buried in kilometers of dirt, their fleshes eaten raw by the maws of time, leaving a rotten, deep, putrescent imprint on the bodies; their bones wiped clean, so clean, now a white pure that reflects light like white paper, but old, so old that they rot themselves too, soft and spungy; their blood now dry, with nothing left to run through dusty arteries and crackled veins, a blood that carried hatred, love, pride, angst, sadness, for centuries and millenias, in what seemed like an unending system, now buried so deep down the earth that no one knows what tomb to leave flower on.
The house is empty, yet it tells me. It tells me everything : how to be, what to eat, who to hate, who to love. I do not listen. I never wanted to listen. But as time goes on I understand. The harshness of the sun becomes unbearable, the grass becomes irritable and my skin is red and itchy. I feel feverish, there is no water to drink, no shade to refresh in. Without the house, I will collapse.
Inside the house, there is nothing. Voices of my ancestors ring in my ears, echoing on the white walls. A distant clamor is heard, a rumbling deep within the earth. Nothing can destroy the house. As long as I live, as long as the house stands, nothing can destroy it. Not even me, not even others. Not even those I hate, nor those I have been told to hate.
I have seen the house before. I have seen it as a child, in a fabricated memory. A house in a tale, in which children hid. A house in a movie, in which people talked. Always, always the house had been there. As a child, mind blank and innocent, not yet tainted by the world, the house is inviting. Over time, I understand the terror of the house. It feels me with horror. I try to run away, but the field is never ending and the zenith is never waning. Over time, I learn to cope with that terror. Over time, even the sharpest blade smoothes down and becomes blunt.
But I cannot flee. The fear of the house is strong, but the outside is scarier still. I don't want to become ashes carried by the wind, on a travel that will never end. I want to leave an imprint, to be part of something. The house is something, therefore I must enter.
I swear that by my hands, never again will someone enter the house. If I cannot stop myself from joining the wraiths, then we will haunt no one, except an emtpy house, empty for all time.
In my dreams, there is an emtpy house. I am in the house. On the wall opposite to the door, the world outside is a hot pink. The sky and the field an unnatural color. On the wall, a dark green square floating above. To the left, the world is a bright yellow. the field lighter than the sky, the sky too dark. On the wall, a dark purple square joins the green one. To the right, the world is blue. The field is dark, but the sky unchanged. An orange square on the wall.
From far away, the house twists knots in my stomach. I know what is inside. From inside, my throat tightens. My heart beats faster, and a cold shivver grips my neck and slides down my back like an insistent lover. I gasp for hair, inhale a hundred thousand ghosts. Ghosts with no body left, turned to dust and rot by time. Ghosts with no bones left, turned white and squishy by time. Ghosts with no blood to hold their anger, and yet they are angry.
The rumble deepens. I feel it in my stomach. It rattles my soul inside my empty body. It comes from deep within the earth. Too deep. So deep the earth does not exist where it comes from.
Like a chapel on a roadside, the hous is white and small. Inside, time has left baggages of dust. Like a chapel on a roadside, the windows are dark and grimy, the inside hidden from the outside. Grime and ashes slathered on the glass, trying to get inside. But the paint on the windows is not yet cracked, still clinging. I'm afraid.
Unlike a chapel, there's no holiness in this house. There are only ghosts, like in a chapel, ghosts of the past, their qpite and anger clinging in the field in a stain shaped like a house.
The home in my dreams is small, stuffy, choking me with every breath.