Home exchange

On Saturday, I slept in a house swap. The owners were letting me stay in exchange for someone else's house. I'd never done that before, and I initially had a ghostly feeling. The night before, the owners had been sleeping in that terraced house. Nothing had changed, only the tenants. For a few hours, I was a hidden neighbor, like a woodworm in a piece of furniture.

I held other people's keys, grasped door locks that were familiar to different hands. The light switches felt strange. I had the impression of being invited even into objects. Lowering and raising the blinds made an unusual noise, like the road. Voices passed through walls of a different porosity. The freshness of pillows, sheets, and towels wasn't exactly my own. There were strange neighbors, artificial grass, and only two paintings, and on only one wall of the house. The cleanliness and order were different. I slept in a girl's room. I opened the closet and it was full of dresses hanging, like in a dollhouse. I hadn't seen it for a long time.

In the entire house, I only found a dozen impersonal, mass-produced books, placed on a shelf in the ironing room, among objects like relics: a VHS camcorder, an analog television, photo albums… Even so, 99 percent of it was the same as in the entire hotel; privacy is greater than in the hotel precisely because privacy itself is interchangeable, as are hospitality and gratitude for shelter. I could have worn the owner's clothes, been married to the same woman, had the same daughter I saw in the framed photographs.

It seems like a house should be full of secrets, but there was no trace of them. Every room was accessible, including the garage. Secrets, if we're lucky enough to have them, are inside us. At most, recorded on computers and cell phones, which are portable and you take them with you.

In the kitchen, there was no shortage of fruit baskets or coffee in a jar. I ate breakfast while looking at the magnets with notes hanging on the refrigerator, along with the little girl's class schedule. Nothing was foreign to me. I thought we could do not just house swaps, but also people and lives. I offer the idea to programmers who want to create an app and a start-upMany people would sign up. The exchanges would barely be noticeable. We would become more aware of our modesty, even of the limits of our freedom.