The Ongoing Picture Challenge

History in the Houses

“Noah!” I cupped my hands over my lips and looked down at him, waving the light from my phone at him to get him to check his own cell. I had texted him questioning how to get out of our house without waking the baby who sleeps so light a falling tack could wake her.

“Tree house.” His text gleamed at me, and I sighed as I watched him retreat out of my vantage point to our little tree house next door. A humble sticks-and-leaves house was constructed next to our classic home. Noah and I had spent many times in there as hobbling tots, but I hadn’t set foot in it in years. It was sturdy, but a major eyesore. My father had helped build it with planks of wood. We decorated the outside with all the crap we could find on the streets. But kids can find potential in everything, and we couldn’t have wished for anything better.

I had a small window that faced it, and it was a short distance of a couple meters away. If my memory served correct, my dad had left a few discarded planks, and if Noah’s brain was working correct, that would be how I would escape this house tonight.

I was right, and he was still an idiot. A loud noise erupted around me, tackling the carefully placed silence of this house. He had managed to get the wood across, and it banged onto my windowsill with the grace of an elephant on stilts. Profanities bounced around my brain, threatening to spill across my tongue as I looked across the wood panel to Noah, looking as frightened as a deer in head lights. I countered his facial expression with my own death glare. The seconds that followed were agonizingly painful as anxiety bit at the air. My ears prickled for the screeches of Izzy, my baby sister, the footsteps of my angry father, or the shrill scolding of my mother. I exhaled after a prolonged amount of time, deciding that the coast was clear.

I slipped out of my window, deciding to simply crawl across the board and tumbled into the small room of our childhood abode.

“You idiot!” I groaned as my knee scraped the ground and I felt safe enough to yell at him.

“Sorry! I wasn’t thinking!”

“You’re never thinking!”

I glared at his tousled hair lit only by the outside moonlight, gleaming exceptionally bright tonight. His emerald eyes held their own luminescence. I sighed at him as he slowly slid the board that formed the bridge to my room back inside.

“What’s this?” I stood up, taking in the unfamiliar objects in my surroundings. A telescope sat propped facing our little niche that captured the wide abyss of sky, Polaroid pictures lining the usually bare walls, and a few blank pages of paper lay stacked in the center surrounded by pastels.

“Noah, unless my parents have been hiding out in our tree house, what did you do?”

I saw the silhouette of his smile peak at me in the half dark, and it was driving me mad to not have control of this situation, to not have control over his surprise visit.

“I know what you usually do, up so late at night…” I felt a claw grip my heart with excruciatingly painful talons. A knot rose up in chest and I felt the familiar darkness seep in. What I usually do up so late is wallow in my pathetic pity, reading or writing and trying to distract myself from the inevitable depression that comes with the arrival of the speckles of stars. I dream of escape, I dream of death, I dream of morbid secrets I discover in my scars.

“What do I do at night?” I breathed, daring him to tell me what we both knew, daring him to make a difference.

“You sit up, dreaming of our wedding,” he smiled, but I knew it was halfhearted. He was doing what he always did, lightening the mood. There are some moments that even light will not shine in.

“You wish,” I tried anyways, feeling the rhythmic beating of my heart. I idly wondered how a person who feels so dead could have such a vigorous semblance of entity.

“But seriously, I didn’t want you to go through what you have been going through again, and I know I can’t do anything to stop that. But for tonight at least, I’m going to make it bearable.”

The night unfolded into something monumental for the both of us. He did something I could’ve never done on my own; he brought me out of my head and into a manageable reality. Even better, he made me a night worth living for. He showed me Polaroid pictures of our adventures through adolescence together. He showed me the stars, and he spoke about them as if they were a creation from his own fingertips, a work of art of his own doing. He talked about their names, their own personal role in bigger constellations. And he showed me a picture of a dog riding a bicycle he made out of the pastels, which looked like a kindergartener had made it. I told him he should stick to his intelligence of the stars; his creationism with pastels wasn’t working for him.

Ten years later, when we were in our twenties, our little tree house was constructed into a twin house to my parents’. I was less than thrilled to be so close to them, but it was the price I paid for preserved memories. We painted it a mix of hopeful shades of blue and secretive shades of violet. We had brought our memories to life in an inanimate object. Funny, the place I had so dreamed of escaping became my only sanctuary.

However, just as quickly as life was born on our house, nature swiped it from existence as a tornado came through late at night. Our houses didn’t see it coming, and neither did we.

“So, what story do you think this one has?” Miles tilted his head in the direction of the collapsing purple one. I stared at it for a long amount of time. Shrugging, I kissed his cheek softly and stood up.

“Who knows? But I’m going to live there,” I told him, stubborn as ever, and sure of myself that it would happen. I would live there, fix it up a little, and create a story of my own.