Dream house

I had gotten a steal on a huge house. A house with hidden rooms and tucked-away stairwells and the kind of complicated, byzantine layout that makes one think of the inner ear. There was one room with a wall of windows, each pane capable of opening on its own if you had the proper key, the whole wall lit by large, twinkling glass bulbs that turned themselves on at night. The seller had left behind so much: televisions, coffee filters, dinner tables, dog bowls, a Sega Genesis, newspapers. I walked around, discovering new rooms and neat little nooks where interesting things were stored. My family was there surveying my new home, amazed at my find and what it would mean for my new life.

I confided in my mom that I wondered if something bad had happened to cause the person who’d lived there before to leave all her stuff behind. “I mean, I don’t get a bad vibe from this place,” I explained. But it sure was weird inheriting all this stuff from a complete stranger. I was inspecting a business section cover (for a paper I have never seen before in real life but that looked a bit like the old CAmid-’90s layout style) and it dawned on me that the woman who had owned the house before me had been a newspaper designer. I saw tell-tale press-test signs on the page and felt proud of myself for sleuthing it out.

Then she came in the door. And it was like meeting a lost family member. I started crying, she started crying. We hugged. My parents took pictures. It was a full-blown reunion. She started telling us about her life, about how she didn’t work for the paper anymore. She was dressed unflatteringly, with a too-small, coral-colored button-down shirt and unflattering blue jeans. It was the outfit of someone who cannot be bothered to care about something so fleeting as fashion. Her face was kind and she had shoulder-length, sandy blonde hair. She was sweet and warm. And seemed sort of sad to have passed on her house and her things to someone else, but she had certainly meant to do so.

And then I woke up. So she’ll never get those things back.