Soft House

About

“There’s an emoji on my phone that I’ve never used, of a shell-pink tower-block building with blue windows. Smaller than an apple seed, crumb-sized — if that — it stands six stories high. Six windows going up: three square, three rectangular. This emoji is further detailed with a letter H — pink too, but more or less magenta — that hangs on its front and is matched in size by a pink heart floating above the building’s extension; like a shiny Mylar balloon escaping into the sky. The H and its accompanying heart were an expression of, in my mind, heart hospital. Or heart doctor. I was sure that the building stood for all matters having to do with that four-chambered, fist-shaped muscle we carry — that carries us — with constancy. That beats — did you know? — more than one hundred thousand times a day.”

— Durga Chew-Bose, ‘Too Much and Not the Mood’, 2017