I suppose that every house is haunted- memories and ghost creep inside their walls. But these are not ghost seeking to play out some epic revenge filled saga, these are simply ghosts of how things used to be. Like indentations on rugs that work as the gravestone for where chairs used to sit. Or the paint peeled back just enough so that the house tells you it wasn’t always this way. See we build our homes out of brick-shaped, compressed memories. We make the creaking stairs the house singing to us. The pencil lines on the wall of childhood heights that are now at your knee remind you of a dead former you.
But her house was particularly haunted. It wasn’t that more life had happened there, it was that it was louder. Her front door always was closed, and the lights were never on anymore. The blinds were drawn tight, and the only thing that would escape from that house were little floods that seeped out of the holes. The roof was falling in on her. But inside she was experiencing everything at once, like all her memories were combined into some nostalgic twisted present. Between flashbacks of days on the porch and hiding under her covers, she could feel the sad and hopelessness blowing in as a draft through the cracks in her walls. She cried anytime she knocked over a glass because she knew how fragile her house of memories was and how at any minute, like a glass, it could shatter into shards that would shred her illusion. She could shatter at any moment. The doctors said it would be soon. That the support beams of her bones were brittle and her wall of skin was cut too deep. When does a body stop becoming ours? When she stopped being able to control it, when she was locked in, when she has to pay rent with her youth and her smile, then her flesh turned into wood. And I cannot say that she is gone, only that she is locked inside and all I want is to knock on her door and say “Can you come out to play?”
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