The house down the street had no door, and no windows, and no chimney, and was functionally indistinguishable, really, from a large concrete block. We had no way of telling if it was even hollow, or if there was anything inside. But somehow—as though from some primal knowledge, seeded in us by God, or by God knows what—we knew that it was, in all meanings of the word, a house. Some days, or more often some nights, we all around the neighborhood could have sworn that signs of life—beautiful, undeniable life—asserted themselves, though we could not, between us, reach any agreement about what manner of life might make its home there, and what sustains it.
Other kids in the neighborhood, ones that could have been my friends had I not been so ardent in my refusal to surrender myself to that sort of thing, having convinced myself that I enjoyed the solitude, insisted that there is some sort of god locked in there, although if there is a god that is powerful enough to survive in a sealed concrete cube but too weak to find its way out I have yet to meet them. The other kids were not excited by my notion that the person living in that house was just like us, but I suppose, looking back, that my excitements were too unwilling to compromise.
I wondered, sometimes, how everything around the house down the street was so clean, partially because by that point we'd let the novelty of our own house fade away. There was never any graffiti there, and the front yard, while not particularly exciting compared to the rows of suburban families who had felt more of a need to prove something, was always clean enough. It could have, conceivably, been inviting; it kept itself this way.
It was for this reason, I think, that people always walked by the house and never tried to investigate. Even on those hot summer afternoons when the Adlers invited everyone for their barbecues, before they moved away, they were always careful to stick to their side of the line, even though even if they crossed over to the yard next to theirs there would be no confrontation about it, no apologetic casserole to bake afterwards. There was just that unspoken mutual respect that kept the house alive.
There were days when I stayed home, pretending I was sick, just to watch in case the house decides to reveal its secrets to me alone, but I never came away with any special secrets. There were some scraping sounds, especially at nighttime, as though the house down the street knew how much I hated that tight silence in our own house and tried to save me from it, but I never answered its call, afraid that my family would weaponize this passion I'd managed to keep secret. I let the silence coil itself around me, though I don't know if it was an act of letting or simply a lack of any knowledge otherwise.
When I came back to pack up Dad's things, I dwelled just a moment by that house. I was wondering if I should walk up to it, brush my hand on its wall to see if I felt anything give way. But at the end of my wonderings I did nothing, walking back toward our own now-former house, surrendering my aspirations. I haven't gone back to the house down the street since then, but I hope you know, I hope one of us finds a way someday to ensure that you know, that in my darkest moments I wished, more than anything, that I could live in there with you. I hope you know that in some ways I still wish that.