The Stranger at the Door

The Stranger at the Door

I keep coming back to the idea of the stranger. Not the sinister version from late‑night crime dramas, but the quieter, more unsettling figure: the lodger, the guest, the person who belongs just enough to be inside your walls, yet never fully becomes part of the home.

There’s something so rich in that tension. A lodger might eat at the same table, listen to the same radio, even water the plants—but they carry a kind of invisible perimeter around them. They’re in, but not of the place.

That distance can feel charged. Sometimes it’s protective—a way of holding onto yourself when the space you’re in isn’t really yours. Other times it feels like a warning, a reminder that home isn’t always as solid or as certain as we’d like to think.

I think that’s why the image of the stranger in the house recurs so often in films, novels, even old radio plays. It taps into something universal: that unsettling question of who belongs and who doesn’t, and how thin the walls are between the two.

It’s a theme I keep circling back to, because it says so much about how we build identity in spaces that are shared, borrowed, or only ever temporary.