Gate-House
There’s this exquisite house of mystery a twenty minute walk from my house. Of course, it’s not really a house at all… but it’s the sort of place I’d like to live, so it’s a house to me.
This old, small, long defunct railway station. Gravers lane station. Even the name has some ancient mystique about it. I can’t help but be drawn to the liminal, and what embodies transition more than a train station? This liminal space of liminal spaces cannot help but be made of archways, thresholds, pillars… everything that constructs this eerie palace is a door or a window or a boundary. Other eyes might see a decrepit building, made the nest of some angry, flying, stinging things. A place that’s obsolete, not even really part of the train line at this point, despite el trains still rolling past, right by on those liminal tracks. For me…. It is a wizard’s lair…. It is the aspiration of a curious mind.
Part of the haunting fascination of it, is that this would-be lair of mine has been closed long before it was ever taken from the railway line. It has been closed since I first saw it, sealed, but still filled with light from bulbs never told to stand down. Perhaps the seal itself, in this transitory zone, seems to me a phantom door. In the heart of my mind it is the gate house, a hall of portals to cosmic locales, some known, some unknown, some forgotten, ready to be known anew….. In this place, or, the shadow world of it within me, science fiction and fantasy find their axis point.
Something small, and strange about me; a quilt of small and strange things roughly coalesced into the shape of a man, is that the idea of living in a place not made to be a home…. It raises a curious thrill in me… or at least to have a home that does not look like it should be a home, from the casual glance. Few things infuriate me(this is hyperbole, a lot of things infuriate me) as much as standard architecture. I grew up in a victorian style house for the majority of my life, close to half at this point, but it feels so much more vast a time. For me, that house was an epoch. Now, I’m under no delusions of grandeur or wealth. The house might’ve been fancy, but it wasn’t really ours, not even close to its entirety. Because of various dreadfully boring monetary factors, we had tenants, and, according to my calculations, run of roughly ⅓ of the house. It was a decent size, but for a family of five, it still felt cramped, the way many houses do, or they do as you age. Still, there was something special about having maid steps…. Steps the average visitor was never supposed to see. Those simple, discrete steps cracked my world open, and melted it shut in a new, fractal way. Now, I can never fully be at home in a place that was meant to be measured by some code, mass produced.
Some deep, chaotic part of me yearns to restore to life some condemned railway terminal, and to raise from its corpse a palace of my own making… no, a citadel. A home is not just a house. It is fortress and wealth. A place of defense, and a place of rest. A place only the bold dare trespass unbidden, and a place to draw near one’s dearest companions. Perhaps, some day, I will raise my liminal citadel, but for now, I’ll settle for the haunting terminal of possibilities. For now, that station will take its place, as a past of rest, and a future of inspiration.