I Opened the Door of My Home to Sadness

We kept her out of the house for many years.

To tell the whole truth, we didn’t even know she was so close to us. We realized after a long time that she was staying in the garden.

Camped out like a miserable wretch, she endured the heat and the snow, the fog and the swelter. She had settled between the palm and the oleander, in the darkest part of the garden, where every evening the twilight quickly turns to darkness. Where the chirps of the locusts seem to come from every corner.

From that sinister lair, she watched us. In the dance of the fireflies, we dreamed of the coming summer. But it was her eyes that were scrutinizing us.

Then she gathered her courage and started knocking on the door. When we didn’t respond, she leaned on the windows, leaving greasy prints from her forehead as she pressed to get a better look inside.

In the fall, among the raindrops, she wrote terrible and incomprehensible phrases on the glass, as if we had the gift of reading backwards.

She figured out the trick and started writing backwards so we could read it the right way.

We didn’t look outside for many weeks, waiting for the new rain to wash away her words.

By now, we had no doubts about her presence, but we still wanted to ignore her.

We did our best to live without her. We didn’t need her. But she seemed to need us desperately. She was pushing to come inside.

She howled every night. She drowned out the wind’s whistle. She screamed in the dark until morning, blending with the rooster’s crow.

She used to fall asleep at dawn. The smell of coffee disturbed her, and she woke up irritated, possessed, ready for new attacks.

One night I was awake. I had fallen asleep in a good mood, but suddenly my eyes opened, and sleep was gone.

A train was passing in the distance, growing fainter. The garden was as silent as it hadn’t been in years.

Only the croaking of small frogs.

Sadness, in silence, waited.

Someone had to surrender that night.

I put my bare feet on the floor and went to the door that opened onto the garden.

I flung it open, found a large stone to keep it propped, and went back to bed.

I lay still, listening for I don’t know how long. There was a theatrical silence in the living room and the garden. Reality is noisier. I succumbed to sleep with the vision of something entering, protected by the shadows like a rat.

Sadness had come in.

The new day

With the sun hanging in the kitchen window, she awaited us at the breakfast table. She had already made the coffee. The same coffee whose aroma she hated, but she had already drunk a cup, and now she was working on her second.

She offered us two cups. She had chosen the right ones, the ones we used to have for breakfast.

In all these years, she had watched us closely, the disgusting thing. She knew all our habits.

She had cold, long, pale, and bruised fingers. They gripped the cups like the embrace of a future from which there’s no escape.

From today, I will always be with you.

Her first words of the morning.

We had tacitly decided never to speak to her, and never to look her in the eyes.

She did both. She looked at us and talked to us constantly.

She did her best to keep us from getting used to her. She always kept the volume high, the line busy, let a sheet of paper slip to the floor, sometimes pushed us to argue over trivial things, or to remain inexplicably silent in the living room at evening.

But habits are strong. They sneak faintly through the cracks in the walls, becoming bridges that unite individuals who would have nothing in common if not for the habits themselves.

Habits are strong, as I was saying, and we learned to live with our sadness.

In the evening, the three of us sit in the living room. We reserved the most comfortable chair for her and placed it a bit away from the lamp. A cone of shadow from which only her hands emerge, holding the book she’s reading.

Sleep comes regularly, perhaps her digestion is a bit slow. The book falls to the floor with a thud that doesn’t wake her.

We wait silently for about twenty minutes, then very carefully, making sure not to wake her, we turn off the lamp and go to bed.

Every morning, we find her in the same position, still asleep, the book open between her slippers.

I like to wake her with the smell of the coffee she detests.

I hand her the hexagonal cup and say, Good morning, sadness, while I smile at the sliver of sunlight that illuminates her mouth, crusted with sleep.

Groggy, dazed, she can’t find a response. She just grabs the cup with those cadaverous fingers and takes her breakfast.

She’s getting bored. It’s obvious.

She forced her way into the house, and now no one pays her any attention. Ignored like a perfect stranger.

She spends her days in her chair, reading gardening magazines.

Maybe she washes once a week.

Sometimes she perks up. She jumps up from the chair and starts dancing in the middle of the room.

She does this on holidays, or when I look at photos from my youth.

I feel her coming up behind me, and suddenly on the monitor, I see the reflection of her face. Eyes bright like fireflies, jaws strong like those of nocturnal insects, chewing contentedly on a gummy candy.

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