The Houses Odyssey
Before The World Learned About Us.
I strolled past the empty house, Its shadow hunched like a forgotten question. I walked past it again, Rain blurring its windows into eyes holding back tears. On my third pass, I paused, Staring until my breath matched its silence. Its loneliness felt familiar— A dialect I’d spoken all my life.
So I began to sit there, Scraping moss from the porch steps, Sweeping dust from corners Where cobwebs tangled like grief. I sketched the house never as it was, But as it asked to be: With light pooling in its hallways and curtains humming hymns whenever the wind lingered.
One day, strangers crowded the lawn I’d once clawed bare, Their laughter echoing off the walls I’d once traced. The house wore fresh paint now, The door open like a mouth mid-song. They called it charming, quaint, a hidden gem— Names it once craved. They didn’t know beneath the gloss lay scratches From nights it gnawed at its own beams, Or that its hinges still screamed when storms rolled in.
I stood clutching the sketch I’d come to hang— The house as it asked to be, Now its truth etched in fresh paint and borrowed light. The house met my gaze through the glass, and for a breath, We remembered:
Before the paint. Before the light. Before the world learned to want us— Before…
About the Creator
Andra river
I love experimenting accross different styles and themes to tell stories that inspire, though most of my work is pathos-driven. when i'm not writing i'm either watching anime or sleeping.
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More stories from Andra river and writers in Poets and other communities.
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The careful words we bite back, the itch that swells before a sneeze, the way joy blooms under your skin like a sunflower stretching toward spring, and how sadness settles over you—a weighted blanket pressing down to the marrow. Feelings shift like the weather, unique as fingerprints yet familiar as breath. For each of us, at different measures, we all know these tides: the swell, the crash, the quiet, aching in between. We all know it by name- even when we pretend not to. Some mount them like stallions, let their currents chart the way, others build walls against their tides, refuse to speak their shape. But the bloom and the weight are no less real.
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Comments (1)
I never knew odyssey was a word by itself. I'd always associated it with some Greek or Roman myth. I had to look up the word today, thanks for a new word.