“Our House”

“After Bosch’s lurid phantasmagoria, Skylar welcomed Graham Nash’s lullaby. It floated past like a soft-pink and baby-blue laud to the high joy of living in innocence and love, exalting the domestic to the level of the sacred. By doing so, it portrayed home as the utter opposite of what it had always meant to Skylar. The song represented the promise of a Platonic eidolon, or perfect ideal, of a house: with a lit fire and fresh flowers arranged in a new vase. The house’s lady composer tries out songs on her lover and then rests her head on his shoulder (as Ilona once did on Skylar’s); sunlight fashions fire-jewels while cats play outside. But all these elements are but the marble for the statue or the oils for the painting: what breathes life force into the song is the peace and contentment born of the love shared by the two householders. Love makes the fireplace cozy and welcoming. Love allows the plums and tangerines in the flowers to ripen. Love dispels the demon, time, and disarms it of the sharpened claw, finality; leaving an endless now, repose, and gentle beauty. “Life used to be so hard / Now everything is easy / ’Cause of you” —Skylar could not imagine life as an easy process. Love might be a pass from the front lines of the war zone, but the fighting would always go on.”