“The Common Features of Other People’s Houses,” by Sarp Sozdinler

Oct 30th, 2024 | By | Category: Nonfiction, Prose

1. They are (infinitely) cleaner than that cesspool you call home.

No particle of dust would dare occasion to life and every speck of fingernail dirt is manicured to death in those matrimonial homes where attention to detail is a time-honored virtue and everything smells of the same multipurpose detergent, like bedsheets in sad hotels. Those houses are policed by unimpressed Virgos who massage their furniture with spit and wash their mopheads as frequently as their hair. If living inside a toothpaste tube were a social norm, those homeowners would be the forebearers of an all-white nation. But, see, that’s the one thing you can’t understand: nothing should ever stay the same. Most certainly not your decaying one-bedroom stinkbomb where even houseflies are big enough to have a room of their own and that dried patch of shit in the second bathroom is a running joke among concerned family members and friends like a rumor flowing through the world of hard truths.

2. Food is (ethically) better, if not duller.

Caramelized onions, ribboned turduckens, marinated Kiev cutlets imported right out of Ukraine. Rubbed slowly to the internal warmth of a Turkish bath and left to breathe in air-conditioned room temperatures, even your skin could crack like an oyster’s shell. You can mine protein out of almost anything in these speculatively upper-middle-class kitchens, including the table corners that may or may not still contain rouge snippets of sustenance from bygone meals. Tea isn’t deemed a lifestyle trait by those homeowners but the cornerstone of civilization while you feast at home on battery juice and that five-dollar rotisserie chicken you bought from Costco which, as only your inner cable-TV gourmet can tell, is probably not even made of real chicken.

3. Everyone seems (begrudgingly) happier.

We’re talking about a place decorated so politically and socially neutral it would make Switzerland look like Prussia at its worst, a parallel micro-universe where the ultimate goal is bedtime peace, and where the debate over racism and poverty and class can be leisurely navigated over roasted turkey and portwine, and where healthcare and students loans are not yet seen as part of the problem. Valentine’s Day or not, these people buy each other flowers every other week and have the gumption to call their parents outside Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and foster the ability to exchange election predictions without having to resent or make fun of each other. Come the end of the night, everyone goes back to their love nests while you sulk back to your apartment only to wake up the next day with same damp armpits on your stoned Looney Tunes undershirt. You spend the rest of your morning Xanaxing your kids off to school and crying yourselves back to sleep while trying to figure out the point of it all.

4. Residents are (arguably) more cultured.

Mid-dinner, the hosts suddenly want to talk about ballet. The walls are covered on end with bookshelves full of other people’s interests ranging from leatherbound classics to color-coded travel guides for places yet unvisited. The road to the bathroom is paved with Ottoman marble and flanked by landscape puzzles and nude pictures shot in black-and-white to make them look more ironic than erotic. At some point, the host’s fourteen-year-old wants to make his opinion known about climate change while standing next to a non-recyclable faux-marble statue of Pythagoras whose philosophy books and clothes seem to be missing on his person. You are suffocated by this urge to go back to your own private Idaho where the walls are as white and empty as a church and dully mirroring the inner world of their owner.

 5. They are (logistically) closer to all the significant landmarks.

Unlike your remote one-bedroom condominium that faces a pet cemetery, other people’s houses are almost always one traffic light away from busier parks in town, sandwiched between a recently opened mall and an elegantly sculpted statue of some obscure god. Their commutes are often quite merciful time-wise, allowing them to enjoy a long shower in the morning and endure an arthouse movie with their spouses come nighttime. Thanks to their logistic convenience, those lives are run with clockwork efficiency and (usually) buoyant mood where the only real worry is deciding over whether to spend their surplus salary on a yearly gym membership or on some new-age proto-religion whose recruitment center opened just around the corner. All while your home is painfully closer to the city’s Welcome sign than it is to downtown and humbly looks like a slightly altered version of the victims’ houses you see in crime shows, with an additional toilet seat cover here or a broken vase there. You hear voices from the cemetery at night.

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A writer of Turkish descent, Sarp Sozdinler has been published or forthcoming in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Trampset, Vestal Review, HAD, Hobart, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and Wigleaf Top 50.

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