If Fibromyalgia Were a House
I live in a house that has its own ideas. I pay for it, I keep it, I am here every single day, and I had no say whatsoever in the floor plan. Let me give you the tour. Watch your step. The house rearranges.
The Front Door
The front door sticks every morning. Some days it opens easy and I am out and into the day before I think about it. Other days it takes everything I have just to get it unstuck, and by the time I am through it I need to sit down on the porch I worked so hard to leave. The door does not explain itself. The door is a mood.
The Thermostat
The thermostat lies. It reads one temperature and the house feels like another, and no amount of adjusting fixes the gap. I am too cold in a warm room, too hot in a cool one, never quite calibrated to the weather everyone else seems to be living in. I stopped trusting the dial years ago. I dress for a building whose climate I cannot read.
The Nerve Wing
There is a wing where the lights flicker. The nerve wing. The wiring there crackles and pops for no reason I can find, little electrical complaints with no storm behind them. An electrician would tell me the wiring tests fine. The wiring does not feel fine. I have learned to live in a house where the lights have opinions.
The Locked Rooms
Some rooms lock without warning. I will reach for a word, a name, a plan I made, and find the door to it shut and the key gone. The room is still in the house. I just cannot get in today. Sometimes it opens again on its own by evening, the way these things do, and whatever I was looking for is sitting right there, having waited the whole time.
The Basement
And there is a basement I do not go into on flare days. Everyone with this house has one. It is the low place, the cold place, the room where the worst of it is stored, and on a bad day the door to it swings open by itself and I have to work to stay up on the main floor in the light. I do not pretend the basement is not there. I just keep the upstairs warm and the lamps on and the heavy blanket close, and I refuse to take the stairs down on the days the house is already against me.
It is not a house I would have designed. The rooms are in the wrong order and the utilities are unreliable and the resale value is a cruel joke. But I know it now. I know which door sticks and which lights flicker and which room is likely to lock by noon. And on the good days, when the front door swings open easy and every light holds steady, I walk through my strange house and love it a little, the way you only ever love the place you actually live.