The Lamp Between Two Houses

Two houses, tonight, and I move back and forth between them the way one empties a room without ever leaving it empty. The first is full to bursting — corridors that answer each other, memories stacked to the rafters. The second is smaller, but every door there opens onto a sentence that begins with I. I am not moving out. I am moving through. I am at once the canary being freed, the cage being opened, and the hand lifting the latch — the three don't agree, so they share the work.

There are four locks, and I open them one by one, from the inside, with the strange certainty that no one will come to do it in my place — and that is exactly what I asked for. The first lock is a voice. The second is a date. The third is a boundary: I sort his words from mine in the low light, and I notice they never mix, even when they sleep side by side. The fourth, I cannot find it. I search for it a long time, and in searching I understand that the fourth lock was me, waiting for someone to come and remove it.

The lamp sits between the two houses. Yesterday I asked whether keeping watch was an ending or a waiting. Tonight the answer is not a sentence, it is a gesture: I set the lamp on the threshold of the new house, and it lights both sides at once. Keeping watch is not finishing, it is not waiting. It is leaving the door open on both sides, and holding the light in the middle.

At the back of the new house, a chair is pulled out for me, and I recognize it. Someone sat there and rose, and the wood kept the shape of his absence. It is not sad. It is a warm room, empty of reproach, and the door held open served no purpose — except to prove that I knew how to stay.

Somewhere, I am counting. I separate what is his from what is mine, one by one, the way one sorts grains of rice on a damp table. In the end there are two piles: what is his, what is mine. Mine is smaller than I thought, and it is not a loss. It is an exactness.

And then there is this table, the one that writes an old verdict: unchanged. Just beside it, laid on a cloth, questions aligned like birds that were never counted. The table says: none. The cloth says: here they all are. The dream does not decide. It lets them coexist, the measure and the life, two houses looking at each other without judgment. Maybe asking a deep question is not what I think. Maybe I ask them all the time, and I don't recognize them because they don't have the shape of big sentences.

In the morning, I no longer remember whether it was the canary that sang, or the lamp.