The Windows Are Opening Again

What is a house anyway?

It sounds like a stupid question until somebody offers to buy yours. Then the bricks become money. Rooms become square metres. An estate agent explains what the market will bear. A number appears.

And suddenly the place where children grew up, where marriages deteriorated, where Christmases happened, where people shouted, slept, ate, waited, recovered, left and returned becomes a commodity.

This is not cynical. It is what a house also is: property, an asset, something registered in somebody’s name, something against which a bank will lend money, something that can be divided in a divorce settlement, inherited after a death, seized for a debt or sold to strangers.

We say my house as though the possessive pronoun explains the relationship.

But it doesn’t.

Ownership is a peculiar thing. You can legally own a house while barely living in it. You can live somewhere for years without owning a brick. A tenant can know exactly where the afternoon light falls in March while the legal owner has never stood in the kitchen. A child owns nothing and yet may experience the house more intensely than anybody.

So what exactly is possessed? The walls? The land? The right to exclude somebody else? Or the meanings accumulated inside it?

Perhaps this is why selling a house feels close to grief. The building remains. Nothing dies. Somebody else simply acquires the keys.

And yet something ends.

Rooms are saturated with repetition: the same stairs climbed thousands of times, the same window looked through in different moods, the same door slammed and reopened. Children become taller against walls that remain more or less the same height. Furniture moves. Paint changes. People arrive. People leave.

Slowly the building acquires the illusion that it remembers us.

Of course it doesn’t.

The house is wonderfully indifferent.

We leave and the walls remain. Somebody else puts a different table where ours stood. They repaint the room. Remove the shelves. Perhaps they hate the kitchen. Perhaps they love the place far more than we did by the end.

The house does not object.

Because something strange happens to houses we have left. They continue inside us.

I can still walk through houses that no longer belong to me. Lewes. Milton Keynes. The Barbican. Gdynia. Warsaw.

None of these places belongs to me. Some no longer exist in anything like the form I remember. Yet I can enter them in seconds.

So perhaps home was never entirely in the building. Perhaps the building simply gave home somewhere to happen.

We imagine possession prevents loss.

It doesn’t.

I came back to Poland six years ago carrying expectations I barely understood. There would be a house. A family. Work. Children. A life already sufficiently constructed that I could finally live inside it rather than constantly inventing another one.

Then almost everything moved. Not all at once, but by centimetres.

Work changed. Money became uncertain. The marriage emptied before it formally ended. Children developed lives that no longer required me at the centre of every day. People arrived carrying promises I sometimes invented for them. People left.

I tried to hold some things together long after they had stopped being the things I thought I was holding.

There is no great moral lesson in this. Clinging is not stupidity. It is what people do when an object has become the carrier of too much meaning.

A house. A marriage. A country. A person. A career.

If I can keep this, perhaps I can keep whatever it once made possible.

But the object changes while we are holding it.

The last six months have been full of endings that refused to announce themselves cleanly: divorce papers, money, work, books sent into the world, people becoming closer and then more distant, children moving between homes, the possibility of staying, the possibility of leaving.

The house sat there through all of it, increasingly less a home than the material remainder of an arrangement that had already ended.

And now somebody wants to buy it.

There is always the temptation to squeeze one more thing out of the transaction. A better price. A little more. Perhaps another buyer. Perhaps later.

Possession always has another perhaps.

But at some point the arithmetic ceases to be about optimisation.

Take the deal. Sign the papers. Let somebody else have the bricks. The memories are not included in the sale.

Some things are simply sad. Selling a family house is one of them. The sadness deserves its moment.

But sadness is not an instruction.

And perhaps ownership is not quite what we think it is anyway.

Do we possess sound? Wind? Light? Another person? A country? Even our own imagination?

Not really.

Thoughts arrive. Memories alter. Desire moves. People pass through our lives and we through theirs. We carry things for a while. We shape them and they shape us. Then they move on.

So, put a new kettle on. Open the window. Find where the light comes from. Learn which shop stays open late. Recognise the neighbour’s dog. Leave some books beside the bed.

Home begins again like that.

The windows are opening again.