A tEp bildungsroman

An anthology of experiences at my fraternity at MIT, tEp/Xi Fellowship. Also published on the tEp/Xi website here.

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The house is full of stories. I aged from newborn to near death in the span of a year. In a way then, the accounts below form a bildungsroman.

A carrot family was born from a single carrot and merged back into one again, albeit haphazardly. It still remains to be answered whether or not the carrot was more content as one being or separated into similar but disjoint entities, each with its own personality.

The vacuum cleaner was eating all the patterns on the floor, and I had to protect my family from them. But I knew that everyone was going to be safe because even the vacuum monsters are a carefully rehearsed act, of which I am but a player.

The creatures in the black light stairwell showed their fangs as well. Well, one of them was a blue mushroom so it only had its spores to show; it was near evening, so they were just starting to burst. Andy, Jess, and I were lucky to see them. It probably wasn’t a blue mushroom to them though.

In the kitchen.

Spices from all corners of the globe roared into me. Steam billowed from sinks ready to be ravished with the bowels of the meals to come. The house is a carnival, and its kitchen is equally puzzling and extroverted. It babbled into my ear like a boastful child until its laughter ricocheted painfully in my skull. Antares and Mollie were cooking for the inhabitants of this strange world, frying, chop-chop-stirring away. So this is how the cogs of this house turn—through the manpower of its residents.

Jess had given me a mint chocolate sphere. It turned into goo in my mouth, then a sticky oobleck-y substance that fought its way down my throat. Being in that kitchen gave fuel to its struggle, prompting me to back away. Coughing, I crawled up to 23 to tell grand tales about my adventures in this strange land. The light show was buzzing, and Andy and Jess were almost melting away—the perfect time for a bedtime story. So I told them one.

I told them about the great columns of faces reaching into the blue abyss. The force of nature that vomited light onto us and cast shade for those who were worthy with its gnarled hands. The pug that went out of its mind trying to dig itself out of its own nose. All the while, the orange roses in my room had gone through three whole life cycles. I’m not sure if it made sense but it woke them up just in time for the festivities.

The “festivities” was dinner. A ritual, really. They ate and gathered in search of common ground amongst their disparate personalities, and they found lots of it, judging by the laughter. The steam from the fresh baked cornbread trilled up the stairs into me–the hearty, domestic smell of home.

Right then, I felt like I was watching a documentary of tEp. I knew what it truly was then from the view of a ghost, or at least bits of it that don’t quite make up the whole: domestic autumnal dinners with our squid overlords, aplomb with aprons and mitts and apples; a cast of characters—the house members—breaking the 4th, 8th, and 32nd walls but not quite the last one as they acted out their carefully rehearsed play. We’re unique but still governed by expectations of social performance and puppeteered by forces unknown–hence the feeling of watching a documentary. It’s easy to study something once you’re removed from it, at least, but still hard to see the difference between what people are putting out as themselves versus what they truly are.

I’ve realized it’s the house, or less metaphorically, our history, that’s controlling us all to be these jumbled carnival actors. With its wisdom of all but 150 years, it’s seen enough to impose its will on lowly sprites like us. Is it the playwright, producer, and director then? It feels wrong but strangely comforting to be jangled like a keychain by some higher power made of earth and wood. It’s creating order from chaos: an ill-splattered blot of paint was always meant to be in this endless fractal, and the little pores in the ceiling tiles are convalescing into some sort of underlying pattern. But what if it’s pointless to try to create order from these things? It should just let a paint splatter be a paint splatter, and not have to impose its will on the poor thing. Rather cruel of it to do so, actually. And despite all its scheming, this brownstone mansion has yet to fully grasp the reins over its residents. I see it in our covert midnight conversations, the warm puddles of people that form periodically on the couch, the occasional rooftop glimpse across the river. There’s always more than a house can capture.

This carnival representation of these events perhaps arises from my laziness in forming a narrative of my experiences, carelessly anthologizing them into disparate but vaguely connected events. I don’t think I’ll weave the threads between all these stories, but they are fun to think about on their own. Or pretending everything is part of a carnival is me refusing to deal with reality.