The Friend’s House – Audrey Weisburd

January 16, 2026

When I think of a nook, or the silence of corners, I think about playing Hide & Seek as a child, parading through the labyrinth of a house that belonged to a classmate whose name I’d eventually forget. I remember folding my awkward body into the tightest of foreign spaces, waiting to be found in the darkest dwelling of a different family’s space. A different family’s closet, beneath a different family’s coats. As time dissolved and minutes felt like hours and joy turned to fear, a part of me would always wonder: What if I discovered a corner of their house even they don’t know about? What if I’ll never be found? How far could I take this little game? Would I squeeze through the vents? Would I flatten myself out like paper and rest in this file cabinet forever? Just as I’d ask how far this game could go, the door would swing open, the long curtains would split, an eye would peek out from under the bed, and the light would rush back in.

“The Friend’s House” was always a mysterious terrain, and The Sleepover something uncanny. Nights were withdrawn and nonlinear and there was always a threshold that seemed to whisper, “You can’t go home again…” Everything ran cold at The Friend’s House, a perpetual state of unease, even if I was having fun. This is where I learned that fun and fear can exist together. Many of my most thrilling moments as a young adult have been lit by that electric tension, of when fear dips into fun, or fun dips into fear. That blurry edge between the two. At The Sleepover, the laughing is delirious, the secrets are sharp, the food is all wrong, the rules are all off.

I am not myself here. I am your guest. I’ll play along. I’ll learn the games. I’ll let your mother take my phone. I will hold your father’s hand, recite a prayer I never learned. I’ll even eat the meatloaf.

I will call this the Inarticulable Childhood Dissonance of Other People’s Kitchens. There are two types of people: those who have felt this sensation, and those who have not. Those who have are typically attuned to the haunting pull of ordinary life. We see it in the long dormitory hallways, we feel it in shopping malls, riding the intersecting elevators as babies cry in fluorescent food courts that smell of hot, fried oil. We hear it dripping off the words of the people we don’t trust. We see it in the suburban sprawl, the cookie cutter houses, copy and pasted next to each other, stretching into oblivion. We know where it’s sitting, behind our conscious minds. We have one foot dipped into the pool of the uncanny, and it excites us and terrifies us and keeps us asking questions.

The French have a word for something like this. They call it L’appel du Vide, which translates to “the call of the void.” The term is defined as, “the urge to jump from high places,” an inexplicable out of character compulsion to hurtle into the unknown. But I believe there is also a less commonly described version of L’appel du Vide: the urge to sink impossibly deep into low places. A submerging. This version of L’appel du Vide is not about the reckless freedom of a leap, but rather, the quiet invitation to sink into a timeless valley, and for a moment, let the self cease to exist in the way that you know. Instead of the unnerving lure of destruction, this reverse of L’appel du Vide is about the lure of transformation, transcending the known. The void, you see, isn’t always empty. It is full of possibility. It’s the entire universe filled with stars and planets and twinkling cells and selves. Under the bed, behind the curtain, in the cupboard, in the long stretch of time before I was found at The Friend’s House, I felt the sinking, and suddenly, I wasn’t a little girl, I wasn’t nine years old, I was 16, or 22, or 46, or 94.

At The Sleepover, I am the last to drift off. Your mother took away my devices hours ago, and now there’s only me and my racing mind and the operatic sounds of your churning, clinking house. I look out your window and dark naked branches hang like monsters, casting bizarre shadows all across your family room. This is where I learned about intrusive thoughts, about the rapid fire spitting of fragments from the void, the subconscious melting into the conscious. These are not the kind of thoughts you share with the world.

The next day, I’ll wake up in your living room after a stream of strange dreams. I will look for your bathroom, but instead, stumble into your brother’s room while he is away at college. For one moment, I will allow myself to pause, to survey the unfamiliar scene, the bright posters of girls on his walls, Megan Fox in a bikini, trophies and footballs and an earthy acidic smell. I will pivot, feel around for the bathroom, just to stare at myself in the mirror for too long, lean forward into the gaping mirror’s mouth, watch as my eyes merge to one, like a cyclops, and pick at every pore. Then, I will pull away, recreate Megan Fox’s smirking face, and wonder how long it will take to become the kind of girl that some nameless classmate’s faceless brother would want to hang on their wall. I decide that I will do what it takes to be a wall-girl. Right when the chemicals in my body give me such permission, I will make myself lovely, by some sweaty, faceless standard.

Oh, what a meaningless pursuit, sweet little me! A quest that will only open doors for more uncanny feelings of displacement, but this time in empty parking lots, behind screens, in the shape of faceless brothers everywhere, sitting around a post of me at seventeen, in some tiny bikini, making that Megan Fox face, looking hot and feeling cold and waiting patiently for a connection that will shake me out of this cage—this high-school-male-gaze-cage.

Then, maybe I’ll join your family at the Southern Baptist Church, listen to a sermon from a bald man quoting verse I don’t understand, watch your hostile hateful father guzzle down every word. I’ll go home to my little house of pink velvet Buddhas and crystals, part Jewish, part Agnostic, though none of these structures of thought seem to hold the vastness of the void, the beauty of my wonder, how it feels to step back into my little crooked home, when the curtain splits open and the light of relief floods back in.