Memoir Excerpt

Buildings are the depositories of dreams

My first memory was of a building that promised the return of speech.

For the past month I had been left in the care of my mother which should have been comfort enough. One moment my father was there and the next moment he was gone. No explanation given to a child only three years of age. His absence weighed on me for reasons I can’t explain or perhaps can’t remember. And for a period of time, those long weeks of his disappearance, I refused to speak. I remained silent when asked what was wrong, when hunger struck and sadness too, when night fell and ushered in the heavy certainty that he would never return. 

There were bribes of sweets and a chorus of prayers. But nothing moved me to shake off that shroud of silence until we were driving on a road as long and smooth as it was straight, and my mother’s melodious voice exclaimed, “There is where we’re meeting him,” uttered more so to herself than the mute passenger in the rear. I looked out past the orange-stained earth, and saw a shape stretched flat against the horizon. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. It had a hundred front doors, some with people loitering around them while others just offering a blank beginning. 

When the car stopped moving, my mother took my hand as we walked through a door and into a small room smelling of other people’s joys and sorrows. True to her word, there he was, lying on an unfamiliar bed, resting from his own journey back to us, back to me. The house with a hundred front doors returned the faculty of speech, but ushered in far more than that. It ushered in the knowledge, more ancient than my three years should have allowed, that buildings were the depositories of dreams, the dispeller of silence and sorrows. 

With the return of speech came the return to normalcy expected of a child so young. I resumed with the typical juvenile gains and milestones. I matriculated from preschool to kindergarten and beyond which invariably led to the indoctrination that buildings could house people and objects but nothing more. The strange incident went unmentioned except in passing as the peculiar period of time when I refused to speak. But the inkling that buildings could house dreams and dispel silence and sorrows never left.