“I am a doctor,” a woman blurts on the subway, “I move from urologist to dentist, from dentist to dermatologist, from dermatologist to cardiologist, and still nothing fits. Everything stumbles at once, from a washing machine to a juicer to an oven breaking down in a single day.”
The speaker’s image of the body as a living map becomes a hinge in the mind. One begins to see the house not as brick and timber but as a body of its own, a mobile shelter where the kitchen, the shower, and the bedroom cluster within a few intimate meters. The living room is a lung, the bathroom a circuit, the walls a skin that breathes. A handful of square centimeters cradle the kidneys, the liver, the pancreas, and yet the space is infinitely more efficient than any van ever redesigned into a home. There is a heating system of memory, a blood irrigation network, and downpipes that carry away the debris produced by fatigued cells. The tangible becomes a map of touch and function, a terrain that can be touched, measured, repaired. Two eyes act as skylights, a double-winged mouth as doors that vent what lies inside. The body speaks in the language of the physical, the kinesthetic, the truly organic.
But there is also a realm that cannot be pinned down as easily, a restless mind inhabited by the silhouettes of the self and others. The self is haunted by a small, watching inner figure, a kind of homunculus that shapes subjectivity. A person experiences life as a subject: the pain, the joy, the hesitation, the rush, all felt through the lens of identity. Deceased parents, lost siblings, living friends and neighbors, and even the fictional heroes who populate novels all live inside in varying degrees. The ureters and the gallbladder occupy space in the body and in the imagination, each occupying its own corner. They come and go, sometimes dancing through thoughts, sometimes whispering in dreams. When sleep nears, they throw a party; when attention is turned toward them, the call goes out for help.
In this sense, the speaker is a mosaic of all these presences, a reminder that alienation from oneself can surface in ordinary experiences. This travel through the body becomes a parallel journey through selfhood, a portable dwelling that carries the memory of every encounter and every ache. In front of a car door that opens with a calm, assured voice, the subway passenger speaks again: the body is up to its neck in doctors, and the world is full of rooms still waiting to be understood. This is the story of a life lived inside a moving home, a place where physiology and psychology intertwine, where each room echoes with a patient, a thought, a memory, and a breath. The body, like a house on the road, keeps moving, keeps listening, keeps asking for a sense of wholeness that never quite settles.