There is water in the house (en)

Actually, you’re okay. Most of the time, anyway. Sometimes you still feel a little lonely, but it’s been several months now, and you think you’re holding up quite well. The days are often long, the nights stretch even longer, but life is moving forward, and you’re always finding ways to keep busy. You keep the windows open, let the air move through, but the rain never knocks at the door, and whether you invite it in or not, sometimes the sky decides to cry.

One day, you wake up with the taste of dampness in your mouth, and the odd feeling that the walls are heavy. Then you find a few drops, a little condensation on the windows, steam on the mirror, and some dew on the plants. Tiny, harmless warning and overall nothing you can’t wipe away with the end of your sleeve. Hours pass, you come and go, and the house is creaking, a little bit more than usual, just like a tired sigh within its wooden bones. You’re tired and heavy and sweating, and the house is all of that too. Every few steps you take, you feel cold little drops falling from the ceiling, and then a gentle stream, curling around your and the furniture’s legs. There is water in the house.
You start running around, mopping and sweeping, cursing the sky, the season, the rain that came back, always uninvited. But you can’t fix a flood by wiping the puddles, and before you know it, every room is flooded. Water swirls around your feet then your knees then your waist and the more you try to contain the water that gradually seeps into the house, the more it finds its way—sneaking through all the nooks and crannies and all the places you thought would always be safe. Water is patient, she just knows how to wait.
Until everything is submerged. You’re swimming from a room to another now, and each one feels like a new maze. You approach the door frame but there is nothing to hold onto, you reach for the surface but the surface is gone. Water has gone everywhere and there’s no dry space left for you to take a break, there is no part of you that’s not soaked in it.

The water in the house has changed everything, how everything looks and how everything feels. It feels heavy, unbearably too heavy and too cold. It compresses your throat and makes you forget how to breathe. The water is viscous and tacky and thick, and it fills your mouth with all the words you never said, all the things you should have done and all the places you should have been. It is suffocating but it’s also alive, it is full of salt and of possibilities, of alternative lives and all you never dared. It’s not only the water that weighs you down, it’s its silence.
When you look around, you realize that the house you built with love and care is no longer a home. It is a damp raft, a sinking boat, an empty shell where echoes live but voices do not. The tide has claimed everything, and the house is now hers. You think you could just leave but you cannot really. How could you even step away from water when it is inside you? The water washed away the noise, it stipped everything down to nakedness and silence and quiet and empty. When the night fills the house, it still hums with the sound of distant waves, and it sounds like whispers, like memories or fears or secrets still unknown like a quiet language only the house speaks. It is never loud enough for you to understand what it is trying to tell you. There is no escape.

So you start talking to the moon, as if she could answer, as if she was your friend. Trying to convince her to take the tides with her when she disappears, or at least to shine so brightly that the water inside your house might turn to light.
You’ve been floating away for a decent time now, a few days, a few weeks since the water has come, but it’s only today that you suddenly notice: the house becomes bigger and even seems to breathe. The water moves in rhythms you hadn’t seen before. It comes and goes, like tides pulled by the moon. Some days it’s a trickle, creeping under the floorboards. Other days, a typhoon that nothing can contain.
The seasons change, as they always do, and with each shift, you are reminded that nothing stays the same. Nothing except the water still carrying out around, and in spring it dances, and in summer it feels just like the salted sea, and in fall it rains just a little bit more. We don’t talk about winter, that’s the harshest of them all.

The water still rises, but you’ve stopped fighting it. Now, you let it carry you. It’s now the only one knowing how to move through the house. Every time you surrender, you find new rooms, hidden corners, windows you never knew existed and each one offers a different view of new stars in the sky. There is nothing outside the house. And inside the house, there is just you, and for the first time you think that the house may now be full but it is still your house.
There is a bit of moss growing behind your knees, just like a reminder that you’re always floating. So still, so still—because you are afraid. Afraid that the sun would never rise again and that the moon would never take her tide back and with her the water from inside of your house. You have learned something from these days of floating: not everything must always be fought. So you let yourself drift and get tossed in the waves, past the clutter of old thoughts, past the debris of things you swore you’d clean up and you look at the mess thinking a millionth times you should have decluttered, because all of your things floating around you are being too much.

If water has flowed under some bridges, you still have plenty in your bedroom and it’s not just filling the rooms, it also lift everything you ever buried: making all the dust and all the crumbs float, the ones from behind the furniture and from under the chairs and from all the corners you never really clean, and all the memories you thought were forgotten.
Taking some fresh air is making you see things you hid and you never thought you would find again. The time you slipped on sludgy rocks and almost drowned. Your first time at the pool, when you felt the weight of all the eyes on your skin. A year ago, when you burst into tears in a supermarket aisle. You’ve never really liked water, anyway. The air is thick and heavy with the memories, each one sinking to the bottom of the house, softening the edges of what you thought were true.
Now the house knows how to handle the storm, and your heart has learned how to float when needed. It hasn’t become more bearable; it’s you who has gotten less porous. It’s still cold and sticky, but it has become normal. You think, “I can stay here a little longer.” But grief, like the sea, doesn’t care about your plans, if you’re ready or if you’ve said goodbye, to the water in the house or to other loved ones.

And one day, you will leave the house. But not really—because it will always be here. There will always be water in the house. You will find it even when it isn’t there. The walls will always remember your name, and the water, your shape. Once all swollen and damp, the walls will eventually dry, and the water in the house will become another memory. The house may stay crooked, sometimes a little cold. And you might even miss the water in the house, even if things don’t come back to exactly what they were, because even loss leaves a ghost of itself.

Letting go is not just about losing, it’s about being released, it’s about moving on, even if it means standing alone, on your two tired feet, in your soaked pajamas when the sun finally shines, whether you want it or not, not always brighter, just different.