We are made, unmade and remade by the rooms that hold us.
You don’t know their names yet. The two will arrive with boxes too small for their history and cats too opinionated for their size. The artist with her paint-stained fingers will move through you, testing your patience, rearranging furniture till “the light feels right” for her canvases, while the entrepreneur with his perpetual dark circles will suffocate your floor with restless feet and anxious pacing, crunching numbers in his head with each step. One will leave half-read books scattered just like the other would dirty socks shaped into balls. The laundry pile will be a negotiation between fatigue and eventuality. At first, you’ll be confused by the scent of turpentine and ghee together in the air, punctuated by the unmistakable clickety-clack of an Xbox controller.

You’ll think them a bit odd and you’d be right.

They don’t mark time by dates but by habits. They don’t remember anniversaries or birthdays and won’t even mark the day they first arrive. The first time all cats sit in the same sunbeam will be a moment they’ll never forget but they won’t immortalise it in a photograph. You’ll notice it in the way he hums without realising it, work calls still running through his mind and in the way she clings to headphones like life-support, blocking out the world to let her colours speak instead. In their shared playlist for cooking. In the bubbling of the kettle followed by the loud hiss of the coffee machine. At dusk, they will both fall into silence without needing to fill it.

And the cats, five of them, they’re neither guests nor possessions, but witnesses in their own right. One will pick a corner in the kitchen and refuse to move. Another will perch on the highest shelf it can reach. One will always follow her like it’s a sacred duty, studying her every move. And the fattest one will claim your sunniest window. Don’t bother resisting.

You will learn their names, the temperaments, the territories. You’ll learn about humans too, though it will take longer.

Their love is not loud. It’s the shorthand of a long familiarity.

The stillness of early mornings broken by a chorus of impatient meows. Five cats, five negotiations and five mismatched bowls always in the same order. A ritual performed half-asleep, his fingers searching for her preferred morning coffee cup while she whispers nonsense to each demanding cat. It’s in the last piece of chocolate left on the counter. It’s in the spontaneous, thoroughly awkward dances that break out in the living room when balance-sheet frustrations give way to stretch breaks. In how she slips quietly down the stairs at 3 AM to confirm all cats are safe and breathing peacefully. In how he ensures her medication is always stocked, replenishing before she notices. It’s in how he always checks if she has eaten when she spends prolonged hours in her studio. You’ll notice how she carefully reads his tight shoulders as he hunches over the laptop, knowing when to interrupt with touch and when to leave him in his labyrinthian spreadsheets.

 It’s in the comfort of silence thick with understanding.

They softened here, but not in the way stories like to promise. It wasn’t neat or linear but a slow erosion of old defences, an unlearning achieved through friction, mistakes, the wear and weather of proximity.

Their relationship is built on fractures just as much as it is built on repair– a living testament to how love persists not despite imperfections, but alongside it. He believes in sparing the world his darkness, carrying his troubles like private property; she thinks everything deserves to be examined, spoken and laid bare, as if naming wounds is the only way to heal them. Yet somehow, their opposing philosophies create not just conflict but also balance– teaching each other what they couldn’t learn alone.

He means well but fumbles in the execution. I watched him gather apologies in his throat and swallow them whole. He mistook withholding for protection, and in doing so, built new distances where none were needed. He let his worries calcify into absence, not out of malice, but fear. Scared that talking might tip the seemingly fragile balance they held.

She, sharp-tongued and impatient with ambiguity, would press too hard. Ask too many whys. She carried the unspoken like splinters under her skin, prodding until they surfaced. And when anger came, it arrived clean, practised, precise– the sharpest thing in the room.

They disagree on gods, the virtue of small talk, forgiveness, the worth of certain art and poets, and books no one else would care about. Amidst their long, impassioned debates over the ethics of things, neither of them has the power to change, she questions silently whether a life without this certain shared hunger would leave her half-fed. She loves to unravel meaning just as much as he loves to outrun it.

It makes for uneasy seasons.

I held their quiet retreats from one another, the slammed doors, their long silences filled with unspoken doubts, loud music played to drown out the even louder discomfort, the nights spent at the opposite ends of the bed, each tending to their own brand of loneliness. I absorbed into my walls her sighs after a failed painting, the soft thud of his head against the desk when spreadsheets wouldn’t cooperate.

They weren’t all rupture though. Along the unease lived moments of unexpected kindness.

In the dull hours between quarrels and reconciliations, they stitched life together with peculiar private habits. Shared oranges peeled and eaten in silence, a cat video to punctuate tension, a bad pun, absurd jokes mid-argument that neither fully intended but both would break for. It was the kind of laughter that startled itself into being.

I watched them mend, not with apologies– those came slow, rehearsed and halting– but with proximity. A cup of coffee placed on the bedside table in wordless silence, lights dimmed for a migraine-heavy head, large vats of tiramisu painstakingly prepared while he slept off disappointment, a hand resting on a back that didn’t ask for it but needed it anyway, the warmth of feet entwined under a blanket on the same bed without invitation or explanation.

They were a study in contradiction. Neither of them is easy. Both stubborn. But still, they stayed.

I felt the subtle shifts in their storms. The arguments that once lasted days condensed into hours. Silence transmuted from soreness to breathing space. I witnessed how they learned each other’s patterns, preparing for known tempests with small anchors: to-do lists left by the coffee machine, headphones deliberately placed within reach, the right book on his desk earmarked with post-its, that one brush cleaned and waiting.

I suppose that’s what I wanted to tell you.

You, the new house, will inherit their beginning again. The clumsy negotiations of space, the unfinished conversations, the same arguments they’ll rephrase but never quite resolve. You’ll learn their unspoken language. You’ll watch them fail at tenderness some days and astonish themselves with it on others.

It was in those unremarkable moments– the shared oranges, the wordless coffee deliveries, the cat videos that broke through tension– that they revealed themselves most honestly. Not in declarations or celebrations, but in the stubborn acts of noticing, tending and returning.

When they finally packed to leave me, they argued about taking the recliners, which book deserved the limited space in their boxes. But I noticed how he carefully wrapped her most fragile pieces, how she labelled his clothes with meticulous care. Even in their departure, they practiced the same imperfect attention that had sustained them here.

I want you to know them as I did– not just as inhabitants but as teachers of patience. I have grown wiser holding their arguments and whispers. My corners have softened watching their unrelenting tenderness. I’ve held them in their becoming, watched love manifest not as perfection but as persistent repair, and in doing so, I became something more myself– a witness, a vessel, a home. 

Now, it’s your turn to be transformed by what you hold, to contain both their fractures and their patchwork. It won’t be tidy, it never is. But as they build and rebuild each other with a quiet insistence, sometimes with teeth bared, you too will have to change with them. Learn their habits, hold them, and tuck them into your walls. Preserve the evidence of joy in your corners like you will hold fur. 

And when they arrive at your doorstep with boxes too small and cats too opinionated, welcome them. Let them teach your walls what mine already know– that a home is not a place of finished people, but of people finishing each other.

Slowly shift to hold them in their unfinishedness.