"would you mind closing my wall for me?"

one wall of my bedroom is actually a closet door. on the other side of this wall is the living room. i live with two other people: my sister and my mother. while we three lived together for 16 years (along with my dad), living together today is different than the days of ye olde curfew. we have all experienced living situations without one another: i moved to fredericton; kelly just finished her first year in residence at msvu; mom and dad occupied our family home in cape breton all by their lonesomes (and liked it). with dad's admittance into an intensive care unit came mom's need to re-locate her home to halifax. after two months of bed-and-breakfast living she gave in to her desire for her own, personal space and signed a lease for a two-bedroom apartment. my sister, who studies in halifax and wanted to stay for the summer anyway, moved in. i then wrapped up my final year at st. thomas and moved in as well.

we live together both out of necessity and convenience. it is necessary to live with one another at this point so that we may support one another on bad days, so that we may grieve and worry for dad with each other and celebrate his victories together. convenience comes in to play when considering a rent split three ways, house-keeping duties divided evenly and shared travels to-and-from various institutions and establishments.

i (somehow) lucked-out and have my own bedroom. my sister and my mother share the other one. as one might imagine, tensions rise and fall quickly thanks to close-quarter living in an unfamiliar place. and, again, we've all grown very comfortable living apart from each other. to throw us all under one roof again, for a long period of time, with two of us sharing one bedroom is to throw off privacy and alone time. in our melee of stress, new jobs, old habits and strange excuses for walls, we've unintentially built up an interesting household dynamic...because alone time is so rare now, because we often feel like we live on top of one another, because we feel stuck between an era that reminds us of childhood and a fairly-new stage of life in adulthood we have newfound abilities to ignore one anothers' criticisms (usually) and embrace each others' bits of bizarre. we've learned to laugh more at little things and grump less over even smaller things.

things aren't perfect and neither are we. we have our occasional, collective meltdowns and sometimes dig too deeply at wounds not yet healed. besides that, though, apologies come quickly and genuinely and wins outweigh losses. we all have something enormous in common: our main man, the daddio, has been in-and-out of critical illness for over four months. dad's condition and the changes in it have turned us into iron-ladies who can take in and consider bad news with still hopeful hearts and sit with our dad shackled with wires, drips, monitors and a respirator and still manage to get him to crack a few smiles. his seemingly-endless visit in the i.c.u. has also sucked a lot of life from us: we are all under-rested and over-tense.

help for such exhaustion often comes in the form of naps or laughter. as stated in the first paragraph, my wall is actually a closet door. it is wooden and is painted white and often bursts open at the most inopportune moments (such as when i happen to be changing clothes, for example). what would normally annoy me to no end and what seemingly adds to the pile of privacy-free traits of shared-apartment life has, unexpectedly, become hilarious. i need not even go to the door of my room to answer a ringing telephone: i can simply bust down my wall! if the cat wants to come in for a vist, she needs only to nudge the wall in a certain direction to allow herself in. when the wall mysteriously slides open (running the risk of causing the need to blush and hide) there is usually someone on the other side of it, able and willing to shut it gently for me (and save me some dignity). life is good.