The Bungalow — Part 2
You’ve been building for a while now. The basic structure of the bungalow is mostly up, and some parts are even starting to be filled in! These are the parts you’ve played with before — you had some experience with basements and can stuff a mean pillow, so that pillow dungeon is starting to look halfway decent. Occasionally, when the wind is angled just right, the walls you’ve put up protect you and the night isn’t so cold.
People definitely have questions, but the general form is starting to make sense. With some explanation, they see what you’re building — they can see the future you see. Some shrug and walk away, which hurts more than the cold. Most say it’s “interesting”, that they “appreciate your originality”, and that this “makes them think about some of their own projects” — not exactly enthusiastic endorsements, but hey, the bungalow’s for you! Then one day you’re showing a friend around, and he asks whether you were planning on building the whole thing alone.
You ponder this later that night, swaddled in an unattached hammock. You didn’t explicitly decide that you have to do it alone — you just want the bungalow completed. Yet it never occurred to you to ask for help with it. Somehow it feels selfish, and vulnerable at the same time. You’ve asked for help with all kinds of housing projects before, but those were different! Everyone knows about houses, and you don’t have to explain anything when you ask for help with one. If your house burned down or flooded, you’d have no problem asking people for help. But you had a perfectly good house, and you demolished it. You can’t ask for help now — you tore it down, so you’ve gotta rebuild.
The wine cellar collapses for the fourth time. You spend half the day crying.
That same friend visits a few days later, takes one look at the seed you’re nurturing to become your tree-shelves, and tells you he’s been gardening his whole life and would absolutely love to help. On most other days you’d wave him off, but last night was particularly bad — there was a blizzard, and you spent the whole night shivering and half the day drying your pillows to prevent mold. You meekly, gratefully accept the help, and your friend happily sets about watering the plant and switching out your fertilizer. The next morning, you see a little sapling peeking out from the soil.
You call your friend up and breathlessly thank him for the help, but he just says to call him any time, and that he’ll come around every so often to check on the tree’s progress. You feel a small weight lifted off your shoulders. Not only are you now certain the tree-shelves will turn out well, but you can also direct more of your attention to the other parts of the bungalow — that fireman’s pole isn’t gonna stand up by itself.
Something’s changed. Before, you’d have to explain your vision to complete the construction site in people’s imaginations. Now, you see the same excitement in their eyes that you feel in your heart — they tell you to keep going, and some of them seem to think your bungalow is far closer to completion than you do. Where you still see a construction site, they see a new, exciting, you-shaped home — and they want to be a part of it.
Soon, and almost entirely without asking, no part of the bungalow is being worked on alone. Friends new and old see parts they think they can help with, and set about doing so.
You start to deviate from the blueprint. At first, you panic — the pieces won’t fit together, and it won’t be the bungalow you imagined! It takes a lot for you to relinquish control, but at this point you realize just how tired you are. You shiver just thinking about going back to doing everything yourself. You let your friends guide you, hoping they understand you well enough to build something you love.
You talk to your friends as you build, seemingly for the first time. Sure you’ve talked before, but it was always at your house or theirs — it was comfortable, but stilted, almost scripted. Here, on this construction site, it feels like you can ask anything, and you do. You see sides of your friends you’ve never seen before, and are supremely grateful for their presence.
They tell you about the house upgrades they want to make, big and small, and they all sound super exciting — and far more esoteric than you would’ve expected! Some of their projects are up your alley, and you fall over yourself offering to help. Even when you don’t have a clue about a project — you’ve never been much of a plumber, and cars hate you — you usually know someone who does. You start introducing your friends to each other, and soon they’re hanging out in the bungalow together.
You’re not sure when you started to think of it as a bungalow and not a construction site, but it happened. Lots of parts are still unfinished, and even the functional bits are works in progress, but they’re yours. None of the rooms are insulated yet, and some nights the cold still sneaks through. You can’t tell if the nights are getting warmer, or if you just don’t mind the cold as much anymore — you’re happier either way.
One morning you check the blueprints, look at the bungalow, and realize no parts of the two align — and that’s ok. Your friends’ ideas make more sense anyways. The blueprint got you to where you are, and the core idea is alive and well, but at this point you’re living in the bungalow — you can figure out what else it needs. You take a day off for the first time in a while — you get some wine from the cellar, head over to the hammock, and spend the afternoon in it. The sunroof’s not finished, so you get a mean sunburn. Somehow, you don’t care.
Don’t get me wrong — you’ve still got a ways to go. If you were to stop now, you’d be living in a half-built bungalow, and that’s not what you tore that house down for. You can rest a bit, but you can’t get comfortable — you have to keep building. Adjustments to existing rooms and entirely new rooms alike spring to mind, faster than you can act on them, but you know that to ignore these ideas would be to give up on how great this bungalow could be.
At this point, you don’t just owe it to yourself — you owe it to the people who got you this far. The people who were there in the house, on the construction site, and now in the bungalow. Come to think of it, maybe they don’t much care about the beams and the drywall. Maybe, just maybe, they are here for you.
