I.4 — The Rented House

Everything you have is rented. The cup, the room, the body reading this, the people in the next room — held for a while, on terms nobody showed you, with a return date nobody wrote down.

This is not sad. It is only true, and you knew it already in the way you know the floor is there. The sadness comes from the lease being forgotten. A tenant who thinks the house is his fights every crack in the plaster as if it were theft. A tenant who remembers the lease fixes the crack, or does not, and sleeps.

Walk through one room of your life as a renter. Look at the objects and say the true thing about each: this is here for now. Notice which ones make the sentence hard to say. Those are the ones being gripped, and you have just found them without having to look for them.

The house is good. Rented houses are lived in, loved, filled with meals. What changes when the lease is remembered is not the living but the clench around it. The walls do not become yours by being clutched. They only become harder to see.