I haven’t discovered anything new: nobody matters permanently in one’s life. In the hopes that one will know when to dispense each person inhabiting your house, you treat them unevenly, or circumstances treat them unevenly. In turn, external factors (them, circumstances) behave in the same way. Not everyone is dismissed; some are lost, some are stolen, some simply disappear underground (I have seen some looming in the room I dare not address by name - the opposite of the attic). It is an art to know how to let people into the main door, walk them around, see what rooms they like, which ones you think suits them, and then invite them (or force them) to offer lodging (to hold hostage, he murmurs). For some time. A few chosen ones are allowed to wonder back and forth into different rooms, or even venture around the whole house (granted, an impossible quest) on their own.
Eventually, their stay is over welcomed. They sleep on your couch, walk their muddy shoes on the carpet, try to open a door that has been specifically (sometimes explicitly) forbidden to them. He sleeps a little bit too comfortably in your bed, she makes food that is too delicious, they treat everything that’s yours better than if it were their own. She helps to straighten your bedroom up, he gets rid of all the junk that has been nesting in the storage room.
Tired, defeated, or just plain bothered, you start closing doors.
Click. Toom-Ton. Bang.
(That son of a bitch was annoying.)
Your house is ultimately, unequivocally, unchangeably your own.
It is a compromise, a challenge, a pain, to negotiate it.
Enough. Silence!
I’ll be damned if I cannot set my own rules for my own house.