There’s water everywhere. The bathroom leaked on me and now I have a swimming pool in the middle of my home.

I stand around with a plunger, my feet pruning rapidly, trying to find the source of this madness. It’s like being in a movie, minus the heart-racing soundtrack and the killer who’ll appear behind me and show his face in the bathroom mirror.

The root of all trouble is a malfunctioning drain which in a strange manner doesn’t seem to be visibly clogged. I pour packets of white powder which is supposed to open up the pipes but all I have is milky water with a foul smell creeping up my leg.

After a solid hour of prancing around with bathroom equipment looking like a mess, the water starts to drain. I am not sure what does it, maybe a culmination of a hundred potential solutions.

The floors of the house feel slippery even after hours of wiping and drying.

I spend the rest of the day sitting with my feet on the window sill. It isn’t quite relevant, but it could be.

Home.

We became who we are in a house with checkered tiles and pale yellow walls. We put away our lego pieces in a blue bucket with a lid. We played cards, the plastic variety with pictures of fruits and coconut trees on one side, sitting cross legged on the bed. We kept our books away in a wooden cabinet with glass doors.

The walls had tiny doodles, our names carved in child-like handwriting and random, disconnected words which may have meant something to us at that time. The wall next to the telephone once had phone numbers jotted with felt pen, because clearly nobody bothered themselves with diaries. It used had a funny feel to it, untidy but comfortably familiar. Then the walls got painted and the numbers found their away into more advanced, and less messy, technology.

The kitchen always smelled good and the refrigerator always atleast one thing that made us happy, ice-candy sticks with the cheap paper sticking to them or leftover pieces of cake with a spoon frozen in it, from a someone else’s mid night snack.

We are still becoming people we want to become in the same house, with the memories of all those years lurking behind doors and lying silently amidst dusty books.

In the nights, we peep from behind the curtains and watch the street slowly wrap up its day; boisterous trees, sleeping dogs and twinkling lights from homes of people who have also probably lived there forever.