The Home I Built Inside Myself

I have always had an incredibly big imagination.

I remember that even before I was able to read on my own, my mother would read The Iliad and The Odyssey to me as bedtime stories. And no, I am not referring to the children’s versions of them.

Later on, when I started receiving my first books as gifts, I still did not really know how to read. Not properly, at least. So I started creating my own stories inside my head based on the pictures I had in front of me.

And this way, each book had multiple stories to tell. None of which were actually written inside it.

At some point, we got a house computer and placed it in the living room. On it, I was able to play the first game I ever truly longed for. Although I do not quite remember its name, I remember that it was about a book traveling to Olympus with the help of a nymph, meeting all the gods who lived there one by one and visiting their homes.

I can confidently say that even after I finished the game for the tenth time, I kept returning to it.

I would wait in each scene separately, giving myself time to add something more. Maybe a fact I had learned in school. Maybe a dialogue I had created. I even drew the rest of the houses the gods and goddesses owned and made a whole story in my head about how this little book continued wandering around Olympus, talking with the owners of each property.

In primary school, I realized that sleep was not that easy anymore.

And since the lights were strictly turned off at nine, I spent hours and hours creating stories with made-up heroes and places until I would eventually drift into them in my sleep.

It was around that time that I wrote my first story.

I can barely remember what it was about now. Something about a mad scientist who created a robot and fell so deeply in love with it that he let it destroy him.

I was in fourth grade, and this story was the result of an exercise assigned by my English teacher. Instead of making us memorize vocabulary like parrots, she gave us a list of words and asked us to learn how to use them in sentences.

And because I have always been extra, instead of writing sentences, I wrote a whole story that included all of them.

But as extra as I am, I can also be unlucky.

So on the day we were supposed to read our stories and sentences out loud, I fell sick. The story of the heartbroken scientist and his mad robot was never read to the class.

It remained only mine.

Years passed, and my habit of closing myself inside my own fantasies, inside the worlds and scenarios I created, remained.

Before sleep. After an argument. Instead of studying for a test. Right after finishing a book or a movie. Even inside class, I used to fill notebooks with maps, chapters and back stories.

Every single time, I could take the images my life offered me and turn them into scenarios, stories, and places that would soothe me, comfort me, and most of the time, entertain me.

And only later did I realize that I was not just making stories.

I was building rooms.

Quiet ones. Safe ones. Rooms no one could enter unless I allowed them to. Rooms where the ending could be changed, where the villain could be understood, where the girl could always escape, where love could be rewritten until it finally became gentle.

Before I knew how to build a home in the real world, I had already built one inside myself.

During my teenage years, I can confidently admit that I was terrible.

I picked arguments. I was angry most of the time, or sad, or both. I longed to feel like I belonged somewhere, while doing almost everything in my power to make belonging difficult.

And for a while, the stories and worlds I used to create so naturally seemed to stop existing.

Now, looking back, I like to imagine that I was gathering information. Ingredients. Little broken pieces of life that I would one day use to return to my habit, only stronger than before.

Although I know it was probably nothing as romantic as that.

More likely, it was just a mass production of hormones throwing a party inside me, leaving me dramatic, confused, and convinced that every feeling was the final version of itself.

Still, I eventually came to the realization that I had never fully left my passion behind.

It was only hidden.

Masked behind diary-like entries where I ranted, exaggerated, and expressed my emotions in the most macabre ways possible.

But even then, I was still writing.

Even then, I still found comfort and reassurance in the soft touch of a pen against paper, or in the gentle clicking sound of a keyboard.

Maybe the worlds had gone quiet for a while.

But the door to them had never really closed.

Now, I find myself returning to them every now and then.

Not as often as I did as a child. Not with the same intensity, or the same need to disappear completely.

But sometimes, I still like to tune out of reality and get lost in my own little worlds.

Sometimes I write the stories I think about.

Other times, I let them evaporate into thin air, becoming nothing more than whispers to myself as I wash the dishes, fold clothes, walk down the street, or wait for sleep to find me.

And maybe that is enough.

Not every story needs to be written down to have existed.

Some of them are only meant to keep us company for a while.