Yellow House
By Rachel Dean
My grandmother’s yellow house in the South is something of an amalgamation—a physical structure, yes, but also an essence— a place and attitude we deliver ourselves to once or twice a year. We’ve been going for as long as I can remember, and so I’ve gathered a collection of oddly mundane impressions—the light wood floors and the pineapples sewn on pillows, the coffee cups with their cobalt rims and silver handles. Each time I return, I expect the house and its atmosphere to be different, but nothing has ever changed. The grass outside is still brown, the algae congregating at the lip of the manmade pond. Time. I am supposed to be thinking about it. The passing of it, the stuck-ness of it, the way it orders my existence like an overbearing parent. But actually, perhaps even fittingly, I don’t need to summon this thinking. It’s always already on my mind. During the 14-hour car ride to the yellow house, I read a book by an Irish writer, Mark O’Connell, about transhumanism. There is a movement, largely among the rich and privileged, to cure death by technology. To eventually upload consciousness to an operating system, and if this proves impossible, to merge fleshand-blood forms with varying mechanical parts. Many of transhumanism’s loyalists believe that our bodies are apt to betray us, and that at the moment of birth, we begin an inevitable wandering toward our own obliteration. This isn’t untrue, but it’s perhaps a cynical way looking at life—a glass-half-empty sort of reckoning. The finish line is death, yes, but for the lucky, there’s a good amount that comes before it. In any case, O’Connell, in his gonzo-journalist style, makes their idealism about a cyborg utopia sound garish—an affront to what’s natural and normal. I agree, but then I get to the yellow house where my grandmother is dying from cancer and I think: maybe we’re our truest selves when we’re 28
