What if?

A terrifying, glorious thought experiment

Look, I’ve been thinking: what if I decided that my house didn’t end at the four walls that make it. I mean, it’s a silly idea anyway, isn’t it? That these arbitrary lines of In and Out mean anything much at all. Yes: what if I decided that my house — my home — didn’t magically end with brick and cement, that it wasn’t contained or held in by that, but stretched bigger and deeper than any lines drawn in on a plan. What if I opened the door, and it was just as temporary and permeable as a curtain, and I stepped out into the green May morning and each unfolding scene and sight was just a series of new rooms to explore, no more or less mine, no more or less home, than the one I happened to sleep in. 

You see, I think I’d like that. I think suddenly my ideas about lack or territory, more or less, would begin to dissolve like salt in water. I think suddenly the idea that I didn’t have the right house or didn’t have enough might make me laugh and laugh, as I did when the man who loves me pushed my wheelchair along the avenues of cow parsley and dandelions yesterday, forget-me-nots and buttercups brushing at the wheels.

The idea that I was ever alone, too, would have to be written large as one of my biggest ever mistakes, because, look: I share a house with the robins, and the squirrels that run round and round the sycamores like a helter-skelter, and I share a house with the bees that go from flower to flower kissing each one. It turns out, I live in a full, full house. My housemates are all coming and going — oh! welcome home swifts! — but, yes, it looks like there’s enough space for all of us, space for the shiny black beetle that lands on my hand as we wheel through the car park and then flies on again, space for all the neighbourhood cats I have learnt to call by name. 

God, there are trees in my house! All newly green and unfurling, as old as the elder folk who also live with me, who pull patio chairs out onto the thin verges in front of their doors and smoke cigarettes with their wide smiles and bare, wrinkled arms. What a house it is! What a place! Yes, it needs some touching up here and there, of course it does. The litter under the lime tree and the pothole that trips you up on the way to the shop are as deserving of care and as important as my bathroom that needs re-tiling and the wall that’s crying out for some fresh paint, just as important really. And oh, yes, of course: there’s the air, because that doesn’t stop at imaginary lines marked In or Out either, and there’s no denying it, this house can flood, this house can RAGE, this house can dry and burn and crisp and oh, sweet house, I am so sorry, so sorry I can’t mend all the things I know I should mend, sorry that so much of you needs tending. 

Of course, it’s not always easy sharing a house with everyone else. Not everyone feels as friendly as the baby starlings that poke their wide, greedy mouths out of their nests above my head. There are the swaggering souls who shout and hold hard, cruel pasts in their bodies, and the cold-eyed suits who wouldn’t stop their progress to let you even cross the road, and the people who seem to have surrounded themselves with thicker, more impenetrable walls than any other kind here, closed in somewhere numb and distant and unreachable: the people who scare me, the people who once hurt me or might do one day, the people who seem to not even care if I exist, but what if… oh god, I’m at it again.

Because — and I can’t help it — what if my family wasn’t just who I counted? Wasn’t limited by blood and memory? And the straight-like-a-board woman with sharp wrists pecking at her phone like a blackbird was actually just a housemate I hadn’t learned the story of yet, just as likely to change my life as all the other people I’ve carefully ring-fenced and chosen and marked as safe. What if the baby bouncing in his stretched, grey romper over there, pulling at his mother’s hair and kicking his bare, plump feet, was as precious and necessary and as vital to this world as I believe my own tall son to be, almost a man now, who I waved off to his first GCSE exam this morning with more pride in my heart than I could hold. You know, I think it would make me cry. I think I’d begin to catch a glimpse of how much love a human being can hold — far more than we ever thought possible, far more than we ever allow ourselves to believe — and I’d begin to catch a glimpse of exactly what it is we’re all doing to each other. I think if I really owned all that, I’d want to turn to everyone I passed to say, “my friend, I love you, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” even if I could only say it with my eyes and my smile and my broken, broken heart, all of us together in this vast, fragile, wonderful, wounded, corrupt and devastating house, all of us connected, all of us a little part of everyone else.

Because, what if… and look, I promise I will stop soon… what if my body didn’t end at this thin, soft boundary either? What if the breath in my lungs was your breath, and the thoughts and the pain that passed through me like the wind through the trees were on their way to pass through you too, and the food in my belly was the food you needed just as much, perhaps it was even food you once grew and tended, watered, harvested, drove across the sea, lined up on a shelf, and what if every cell and every atom of me was once something else – a star, a cloud – and what if what’s ‘me’ at all is not something fixed or permanent or simple because, oh hell, that’s all true, isn’t it? There’s no what if about it.

I know, I know, it hurts sometimes to think like this, but here we are and here is what I wanted to say. I wanted to say, I have to say, what if some of my carbon once sat snug against the carbon of yours? If once we sat together on a blade of grass and watched the new morning arrive into this big, big timeless house of ours? Because, my friend, some days like today when the sun is warm and the world aches with life and with loss, it feels like we might have done — it really does. 

What if I love you, what if I love all of this, and I mean it, I mean it with my whole, fierce heart?

What then? Oh god, what then??

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