My house was a peaceful, harmonious, orderly place. It was a true home. A place where I felt protected. A welcoming place. A cheerful place where all my guests laughed and felt just as comfortable as I did. They, too, felt at home. They received the care that home offered me and appreciated it just as I did.
That was why they never hesitated to return whenever I invited them. It made sense: when they crossed that threshold, they found happiness rather than problems. It was a house where we always talked about projects and dreams, each more outlandish than the last. We laughed at our own madness. Still, dreaming was always fun. Imagining things beyond our reach, yet beautiful in their intention: dazzling alternative endings.
This was, without a doubt, a place of beautiful exchanges. Everyone there was eager to give and receive. To play at placing one brick upon another and contemplate the result.
Yet, as in any good story, events took an unexpected turn: an unforeseen guest appeared. Of course, I welcomed him warmly, just as I would have anyone else, although, for some reason, it did not seem to be enough. He looked so uncomfortable that I began to doubt myself and the home I had built with so much love.
“Perhaps it isn’t as welcoming as I thought,” I reflected.
So I asked him whether there was anything I could do to help him feel better. He began making suggestions, one after another. An endless list of them. Then, naïve as I was, I began changing the pictures and decorations, until my house no longer looked the way it always had, and I had stopped feeling the peace my old home had given me.
My guest, on the other hand, seemed very comfortable with all those changes, for now he could be seen smiling. Perhaps because he had achieved what he had come looking for: to stop being the guest and become the host.
The house now reflected his identity rather than mine, and I had come to be at the mercy of his will instead of honouring my own wishes. I had replaced my wishes with the fear of making him uncomfortable. I felt increasingly lost and understood less and less how I had ended up in that situation: one in which I could no longer be myself in my own home.
I grew more depressed as the sense of enslavement suffocated me, for my house had gone from a home to a prison. My house was no longer my own, and I was no longer myself. There came a point when the only thing I was certain of was my unhappiness.
Those days of laughing with my old guests were history. Now they seemed more like a beautiful, distant memory.
Eventually, however, I came to see that unpleasant, unwanted situation clearly and felt compelled to stand up to his wishes. And so, without asking his permission, I put back the pictures and decorations I had always loved. This immediately wiped the smile off his face, although I no longer cared very much, for I was determined to reclaim myself. To recover my old self and my old home.
Eventually, he stopped feeling like the host, and then like a guest, and ended up leaving the way he had come. In a house that sought to be peaceful, only one shared will could remain.
His was the will of fear, and mine, the will of happiness.