The House as a Picture of the Past

by Bright Aboagye

I grew up in a house that sang.

Its walls, wrinkled and grey, blended into the overcast sky like an old photograph left too long in the sun. To the neighbours, it was just another tired building, its shutters hanging loosely, its roof patched in places where the wind had been cruel. To me, the house was a living thing – breathing, watching, and holding onto secrets that no one spoke of, a place where silence lived as surely as he did.

In its early days, the house had been filled with life. My mother had once danced down the staircase in her wedding dress, her laughter ringing through the halls. The rooms had been alive with joy, with voices that bounced off the walls and settled into the corners. But as years passed, those voices grew quieter until they faded into the ugliness of the house, leaving behind only the sounds of what had been.

I wandered the halls alone, my small feet padding softly on the frayed floorboards. I had memorized every squeak, every growl of the house, each serving as a memory of its age, its sorrow. The living room, previously the heart of the home, currently felt like a room that had forgotten how to live. The sofa sagged under the weight of old arguments. The kitchen was a place of shared meals and easy conversation – it seemed to hold its breath, thick with unspoken words.

The room at the end of the hallway haunted me the most. The door was always closed, a barrier between me and whatever lay inside. It was here that my mother had retreated after the last argument, the one that had taken something vital from her. The door, locked from the inside, stood like a sentry, guarding the pain that had settled into the room. I would stand before it, my hand on the cold doorknob, but I never turned it. I wasn’t ready to face what lay in the room.

The house had a way of keeping things – the past, the pain, the silence and the sobs. It seemed to breathe with me, its walls expanding and contracting in time with the beat of my heart. At night, when the world outside was quiet, I would lie in bed and listen to the house. The wind would howl through the cracks in the windows, and the house would groan in response – as if it were trying to speak to me, to tell me its story, our story.

My father had tried to demolish the house, to rid our lives of its suffocating presence and to finally find peace. But the house had resisted, standing firm against the attempts to bring it down. It remained firm within the ground. Its foundation was too strong to uproot from the ground. In the end, my father had given up, leaving the house – and me – behind. It was as if the house had won, had outlasted them all, clinging to its existence with a stubbornness that was almost human.

Sometimes, I played a game with myself. I imagined that the house was alive, that it could feel my presence, and that it understood my detachment. I would trace the cracks in the plaster with my fingers, feeling the cold roughness beneath my touch. I would listen to the sounds, imagining they were the house’s way of speaking to me, of trying to tell me the things no one else would. The walls seemed to lean in closer, as if they too wanted to listen and share in the secrets they held.

One day, I found myself standing in front of the locked door again. My hand, small and pale, rested on the doorknob, and something inside me – a voice, perhaps, or an imagination – urged me to open it. This time, I did. The door opened, its hinges protesting my demands.

The room was dark, the curtains drawn tight against the light. I stepped inside, my feet sinking into the soft, dusty carpet. The furniture was draped in shadows, the bed unmade, and the dresser’s mirror reflected only the darkness. The house seemed to shiver, its old roots grunting as I moved through the room. I could feel the presence of the years, the silence that had gathered in this place, and I knew that the house had been waiting for me to open this door, to step into the past that it had held so tightly.