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  • Essay / Memories in Memories: The House of Memories - 1762

    The House of MemoriesMemories are like bullets, of all shapes and sizes, with unknown impacts. Some are pristine and only hit the sky as fine powder. Others rush by, only scaring you. But there are also a select few who, even when your armor is up, even when you are protected by walls of steel, will find a way to tear you apart and leave you in pieces. These bullets are the ones that, no matter how much time passes, no matter what happens in between, hit you deep in the bones, shaking your entire structure - the memories that stay with you forever. So you can only be a blind soldier when entering the house of memories. Every memory – the fragments, the strings, the shards – will be thrown at you. All you can do before you go into the field is get ready to wear your armor and helmet. You, soldier, created these memories, but even House veterans cannot accurately recall the force of the bullets in their memory. You arrive at a spiral staircase, smooth mahogany and cool to the touch. As you begin to descend, time slows down and speeds up. The stairs themselves change: one moment, the tightly packed bricks of your first house, then the stained and stuffed carpet of your elementary school. Your feet meet the cracked cobblestone driveway of Shanghai, China, then the rough boards of your grandparents' house. A sign engraved in neat little letters reads: This is not a museum. You won't find plaques with descriptions interpreting images; we will not give you answers. It's a house full of rooms, and it's up to you to discover the heart of it. The first door appears. It seems harmless – the paint on the frame is peeling and all. You wiggle the button and put all your weight on the wood before it... middle of paper breaks. You slam the door to the room filled with nothing but shards of glass, and your feet are already at the top of the stairs. And you're out of the house, out of the war zone. The first thing you want to do is watch one of Grandpa's salt and pepper interrogations. Together you will be blind soldiers. And every time Mom goes looking for you, she only sees two pairs of glowing eyes: one broken by the sharp edges of the stars and the sky and the other by shards of glass. Mom will know how to leave. There's a girl running down our hallway with bullet holes in her shirt and the fire is starting to work its way to her scalp. But worse than the missing arm and singed hair, she has a house, but no house, a chocolate ganache, but no Carvel, a grandfather a table, instead of a chair, and a broken reflection..