Why I Love My Cousins House
When I was younger, it seemed I only knew a life of small things. I lived in a small house, with a small family, in an unusually small body, with a small bedroom and lots of small toys, in a small neighborhood in a small town, with many small-minded people. My parents rarely had people over, two or more adults standing in the foyer looked like giants in a gnome’s cottage. I was embarrassed by my small house, I felt my imagination breached the short walls and deserved an expanded space to run wild. In my storybooks, my favorite characters often lived in houses with expression; unique architecture and bizarre decoration. I dreamt of old Victorian mansions with secret corridors and towering staircases. I imagined vast hallways I could run through, dragging my tiny fingernails against the aging wood, and hearing the sweet, haunting sound of an old house tremble. It allowed me a lens into an environment where I felt my physical surroundings matched my untamed imagination, and made me feel larger than the smallness I was confined to.
We had nothing tied to our home; it felt weightless in the vastness of the world. In a family of first-generation immigrants, especially where we came from, there were no roots of previous gifts to unearth and ponder at their splendors. Our family tree was scattered, broken leaves crunched over the East side of America, with some unfortunate branches still stuck in Cuba. We did not have things, ancient pieces of our family’s legacy. My father lost all of that when he came to this country so many years ago. And my mother’s parents, who barely escaped before Fidel’s dictatorship, had only a small house to retell their story, which would later burn down after she graduated college. So I was born into a world where identity could be ruthlessly stolen, and to truly move on was to leave your previous incarnation in the flames of your past life. The only way I gathered information about my culture was from the sad tales told by my Abuela, as my Abuelo shuddered under the utterance of every reminder of that abysmal place. My barely developed cognition could not grasp the sorrowful songs of my elders, so instead I dreamt of the motherland as paradise, tarnished by the wreckage and pestilence of an evil king; the fantasy grounded me in my lost sense of self.
Yet as I worked to forge a new identity from the ruins of shattered memories, I could only imagine the sanctuary that would soon await me when I became old enough to understand it as that.
We had always visited my cousins’ house when I was young. Our home was too small to host any gatherings of more than three, so birthday parties and other familial celebrations were held there. But regardless of special occasions, it was my favorite place to be. It’s a large, two-story home with three distinct pointed roofs, which my father and uncle spent a few years designing and building together. It has no columns or foundations facing the front; not even a walkway from the sidewalk to the front door, so as you arrive it looks almost like a fake house planted in the middle of a neighborhood trying to appear normal. It’s covered in sky blue paneling with gray asphalt roofs, and decorated with vivid garnet front doors with gold knobs. The color of the house is nothing extraordinary. In fact, by itself, I wouldn’t consider it a very pretty color. But standing, as it is, 20 feet with its stocks dug into the ground, it made my younger self feel safe every time I saw it. I would imagine the crimson doors open, the mouth of the house widening as I climbed inside, and the pale color drowning me in its ambiance.
But the true magnificence of the house was hidden inside the facade. The first room you enter is the kitchen; massive, oddly decorated with many sculptures and trinkets resembling the old country. My uncle collected various knick-knacks from antique shops; china plates, paintings of tropical scenery, and vintage store signs which spread across the tall walls, much to the dismay of my non-Cuban aunt. Here, we spent countless mornings and afternoons preparing our adventures into the untamed wilderness. Their house stands in front of a deep pine forest, with towering trees and tiny rivers, and here it was where Lauren, Ryan, Aiden, and I felt we transformed into our true selves. We would traverse the mossy plains, giving mythology to the woods as we went along. We created elaborate stories of terrible creatures plaguing the land with their malice, and we appointed ourselves the prophetic heroes who would instill back the vitality of the forest. Usually half-attempted revisions of Percy Jackson and Harry Potter-esque stories, as imaginative as we were we did not contribute much of that effort into creating unique storylines. There was a secret garden, nestled under an oak tree, which held a small koi pond. We’d enter through the gate, walk along the cobblestone path decorated with foliage, and sit in the center of the garden. This was our lair, the most holy sanctuary of the forest, in which we told our worries to the wise koi fish and listened to their ancient wisdom. However, no celestial being was powerful enough to withstand the torrential rain brought down by the evil ones, and on days when our magic faltered, we brought our pursuits inside.
The living room was our secondary haven. Slightly larger than the kitchen, it was painted a cream beige. But you’d hardly notice the color, as the majority of the space was occupied by windows. Another skylight lit the room in outside rainy gloom, but it wouldn’t matter, as our imaginations rang limitless in all the precious space it had to offer. Ryan and I had a game we played, cleverly called “Our Game” where we used toys and various objects around the house to create an entire ecosystem of different creatures. We implemented baseless mythology into our world, but I found the utmost solace in existing within this strange phantasm. Sometimes intergalactic forces threatened our characters’ lives, while other times a simple “buffer episode” of mindless shenanigans filled the hours of run time we needed to cover. On occasion, to our bloody horror, a beloved citizen of our little town would go missing in the dreadful Toy Room; a place of endless chasms, debris piles, and broken bodies of former coveted characters. Our rescue missions involved perilous voyages into the garbage heaps; skillfully traversing across landscapes of jagged boardgame pieces, rummaging through bins of Webkinz and beanie babies, and worst of all, journeying into the deep mounds of Lego bricks. Sometimes we’d spend days searching for our lost companions, and when the trail went cold, we’d remember them by holding a soldier's vigil, bidding them farewell into the incessant, multicolored purgatory that was the Toy Room. Tragic, as it was, we’d never let the incident disrupt our game, and almost immediately, sometimes without any thought at all, we’d appoint a new character in its place and continue on. We never allowed anyone to intervene in our play, only granting Aiden an occasional small role, provided he did as we said. And my uncle, after watching us crouch for hours on the living room floor, enveloped in our imaginary land, would throw a couch pillow at our display, declaring that a meteorite had just devastated the land, and now it was time to clean up.
Night brought the intangible aura of the house to fruition. The foyer, where the fake front door stood, was all white. An enormous palladian window leaked the fading light of sunset onto the tile, which illuminated the floating dust particles like glitter in the air. Every time I slept over, my aunt and uncle would pile us into Lauren’s room. She had a loft bed, which held a secret compartment in the wooden staircases, only it was barely secret at all, and was the first place searched every time we’d play hide and seek. We slept underneath her bed, as the light from her rotating star projector transformed the space into a small pocket of the universe. I could never sleep; the thrill of the day’s adventure still pulsated in my chest, so as the dozing sound of my sleeping cousins rang throughout the room, I got up and explored some more. Her bathroom connected to Ryan’s room, and I’d sneak in to wander through his various books. Ripleys Believe It Or Not, National Geographic, and Spaceology stories kept me up to witness dawn. Lauren’s room, while only having one window, provided the best view of the forest. I’d prop myself up, book in hand, and watch as the gleam of tomorrow’s promise rose over the trees. Sometimes a small glimmer of light would shine directly onto my face. I’d allow its warmth to shower my body, and for a moment, I wished upon the morning sun to allow me eternity spent in this wonderful place. All that thinking would tire me out, and finally, I was able to end the day, sleeping soundly between my cousins.
