There’s a way I’ve spent more afternoons than I want to count: downloading strangers’ houses.
The Sims 4 has a gallery where players upload their builds. I would scroll it the way other people scroll museums. Find one, place it on an empty lot, and then just — walk through it. Not play. Not move a family in. Just stand in rooms someone else made and look at how the light fell on their staircase. A whole afternoon could disappear like that. Then I’d watch YouTubers renovate the game’s aging pre-made houses, the ones in Oasis Springs and that very first neighborhood whose name I’ve forgotten, built before a decade of updates made them look like relics. I watched other people fix old houses in a video game, for hours, for years.
I almost never built anything myself.
When I was small, I wanted to be an interior designer. It was a real dream, the kind a child states as fact. Then my mother suggested computer science, and I agreed — I was that kind of daughter — and at university I sometimes felt the small ache of the road not taken.
The relief came later, slowly, after I started working. Renovating my family’s own place. Sitting in offices. Scrolling short videos of designers presenting schemes to clients. Somewhere in all that, I understood what the job actually was: unless you are at the very top of the field, your design language does not survive contact with the client. You are hired to hold a pencil while someone else dreams. The word for it in Chinese is 乙方 — the party that serves. I remember thinking: thank god I never studied design.
I said it like gratitude. It was anesthesia.
Because the dream hadn’t died. It had gone into witness protection, inside a life-simulation game, where it lived quietly for twenty years — not as an architect, it turns out, but as a curator. I collected beauty I couldn’t yet make. I studied renovations I didn’t perform. My eye was in training the whole time; my hands just hadn’t been issued a permit.
Except once.
There’s a huge lot next to the Goth family’s mansion — the biggest one in the neighborhood, and no, I don’t remember its name either; memory keeps what matters. What matters is this: I gutted the second floor, took the largest master bedroom, and turned the entire thing into a bathroom. An enormous one. A giant TV in the middle. A sauna. It was absurd. It was indefensible. No client on this earth would have approved it.
That was the point. There was no client.
For one renovation, in one video game, I was both parties at the table — the one who dreams and the one who signs. And the design that came out of that arrangement wasn’t tasteful or publishable. It was mine. A bathroom the size of a bedroom, because the person who lived there — me, obviously, always me — wanted to soak in hot water and watch television, and nobody got a vote.
I think about that room more than I should.
Here is what I’ve finally admitted: I don’t want to become a designer. I want to become the client. The whole plan, when I say it plainly, sounds almost childish — make things, small things first, a hackathon project shipped on a deadline, a novel serialized chapter by stumbling chapter, and let each finished thing buy back a little more of the permit. Until one day there is a real house, with my name on the deed and my design language in every corner, approved by a committee of one.
And I already know one house won’t be the end of it. I can feel it now, the way you feel the shape of a series after writing the first book. One house is one style. I contain more styles than that. So: finish a house, outgrow it, earn the next one, begin again. A game with levels and no final level. The kind I’ve always liked best.
The girl in my last essay never came out of the storage room; she didn’t need to. This one is different. She’s been standing in a downloaded house next to the Goths for twenty years, keeping her eye sharp, waiting for the paperwork.
The paperwork is in progress.
P.S. — A field report
A few nights after writing this, I did something I hadn’t done in years: I went back.
The neighborhood, it turns out, is called Willow Creek. The lot has a name too — Oakenstead. And here is the inconvenient part: it is not next to the Goths at all. It sits beside the Spencer Kim-Lewis family, a household I apparently deleted from memory entirely. The room I gutted was not the largest bedroom on the second floor; it was the second-largest, a light-blue one. Three facts, three errors. My save files are long gone — too many computers ago to count — so I couldn’t even check my own work against the original.
But the bathroom, I had exactly right. The giant TV. The sauna. The absurd, indefensible, client-proof scale of it. Twenty years of lossy compression, and the only thing that survived intact was the meaning.
I’ve decided that’s not a flaw in the storage system. That’s the storage system working as designed. Memory doesn’t keep coordinates; it keeps the story — and then, when asked, it confidently invents the coordinates back, promoting my little renovation to the biggest lot in town, right next to the most famous family, because that’s where the story felt like it belonged. I didn’t misremember. I upgraded.
Which is also, if I’m honest, the entire reason I spent this summer building a memory system for fictional people: because the two storytellers I know best — my brain and my characters — both remember this way, and somebody in the room should keep the receipts.
I’m leaving the essay above untouched, errors and all. The title stays too. The house was never really next to the Goths — but the girl in my memory lived there, and I’m not evicting her over paperwork.
🏠 The house isn’t bought yet. The gallery is still open. The eye is still in training — but now it’s on the clock. (The receipts, going forward, are machine-kept.)