When Rumi Asked Me About Home

One evening in New York an old key found among the narrator's papers no longer opens any door, yet it opens a whole lost house inside him, and in sleep he finds himself at a doorway in Konya where Jalal al-Din Rumi, in an imagined meeting, asks whom he hopes to find inside. The architect answers with his mother calling the family to eat, his father in his usual place and all of them before different countries scattered them, and says he could draw the house from memory down to the crack in the entrance wall, though rebuilding it would bring back neither time nor the people who are gone. Rumi asks why he lets his grandson laugh and denies himself life, and urges him to give those who live with him a share of the tenderness he received, to cook a meal his mother used to make and tell them about her as he sets it on the table, and to keep his anger from reaching the people he loves. When he closes his hand around the key its sharp edges hurt, and when he opens it a little the key stays and the pain eases, as Rumi tells him that what is far may remain far while those who are near need him too. He wakes before his drawing, calls his family to gather that week for a meal from the old home, makes more room for the table and adds a chair, because there is a home he needs to return to.