the house remembers

When I was young, terror was a kindness.

It stood in the doorway wearing claws and broken teeth, telling me don't go any closer.

I thought they wanted blood.

Now when I hear wolves singing through cracked speakers, girls buried beneath choirs, church bells underwater, the slow breathing of abandoned hospitals, I don't mistake them for threats.

The demonic is only sorrow that has gone so long without being held it no longer remembers the shape of a human face.

Youth is allowed to think all of this is simply frightening.

The body is merciful enough to disguise unbearable grief as something to run from.

My father led me up the frozen volcano with his hand on my shoulder.

I thought fathers were built to stand between their daughters and the blade. I thought his body was a door nothing terrible could pass through.

But he believed in the mountain more than he believed in me. The god with the open mouth.

He was given the long punishment of remembering. I was given the shorter one: to be taken.

And then I was under the balcony at the tea dance, music still trembling above me after the world broke open.

Concrete on my bones. Concrete on my wet, animal flesh. An hour of my body becoming a place I could not leave.

I vomited everything I had ever swallowed. The water rose around me blood came from somewhere I could not name.

No one came.

And after me, every girl has had this walking home through her college campus vomit on her mouth, alcohol bright in her veins, thinking: my body is not real. Anything could happen. It does not matter.

We trusted our parents until we learned they were only people standing in costume at the mouth of the cave.

A father can love you in his own ruined way and still lead you to your tomb. He can call it good. He can call it necessary. He can call it God.

I was drunk and hazy, hallucinating gods and insects in the corners of heaven. I was high and psychotic and the world went thin—

I drove my car into a house. I jumped from the overpass. I beat my fists against oncoming metal because I knew none of it was real—

I was trying to wake from a lucid dream inside the only reality that would bruise me back.

Rebar, rebar, rebar like bone gray dust on the iron, iron under the skin.

What do we sacrifice when the inside shows itself? What do we lose when we look and keep looking?

I.

He said words were just the tax we pay on experience, the translation fee, the customs form at the border of the self. She said no, words are the experience, the only membrane between feeling and the void where feelings go to die.

II.

She named the sticks after philosophers. He named the stones after people he'd lost. They played for hours with the debris of the world bark and feather, the husks of things that had been alive and weren't anymore — and invented rules as they went, the way children do, the way God must have.

III.

If he was Adam he was the kind who names things wrong on purpose just to see what she'll correct. If she was Eve she was the kind who ate the apple and didn't tell anyone for years. They didn't need a snake.

IV.

The mind cannot die from the inside. It is the oldest failure of the imagination, that you can picture the tank but not the water filling your lungs. They say the shark dies if it stops moving. Suspended, they say, conserved, as if the glass and the chemicals were mercy. I have stood in a house where someone was arrested mid-motion, where cruelty said stop and love said I know and turned away. The formaldehyde of a shrug. What defines life— the open mouth, or the moving toward? What defines death— the stillness, or the mind that refuses to name it? The shark does not know it is in a gallery. The shark does not know what art requires of the dead. Only the living know the price of being looked at this long, of being held in someone's perception as an object behind glass— formerly living, the thing you cannot quite believe in. The caterpillar consumed everything it could reach, and then the world required the willingness to dissolve inside the dark of its own making and emerge as a thing that can only receive now, only take in the sweetness offered. There will be others. But there will never be this exact one— this self that cannot picture its own ending and so keeps circling the impossibility.

He knew something was coming before he had words for it. We both did.

The magic was us — repetition of love in the same rooms, charging it year by year with our ordinary lives. Someone who came before me walked it without knowing what they did, and I feel them under my feet

I.

Sex is a door in the body you didn't know was there until someone tried opening it from the wrong side.

II.

In my dreams it was always a house set apart from the others on the street, pastels so soft they were almost not color at all.

Not all of us lived there. Some of us had already tasted the apple — a knowingness living behind our faces like old eyes in young light.

III.

She goes down the stairs backwards.

Initiation for a girl is a matter of reversal, a rewiring of the body's instructions.

The baby became blood on the staircase. The girl became something else on the landing.

IV.

You reach the most innocent feeling by going to the darkest place.

The mystic sits atop the corpse and finds what cannot die. The girl closes her eyes and arrives, finally by way of the thing her mother would not name.

V.

A cold man — or the spirit of one — led us before the sun.

VI.

The interval is almost nothing. The ugly crassness of innocence with its pull-up ripped away.

VII.

You know a word no one told you. Roll for damage.

The dungeon is always underneath the flowers. Persephone knew. The poppies mark the trapdoor.

My father praised me for knowing a word. The word felt ordinary in my mouth. His praise was a trapdoor.

Vincent Price says something always in the voice that means don't worry, the horror is beautiful. My grandfather's grave was a field with ruins and graffiti. Men leave marks on things that will outlast them, but don't always know what they're writing.

Driving home in the white pickup. He said: It's pretty sad, isn't it? — and even writing it I hear him, only he could say that, his mother's voice recycled in him, grief passing down muted colors, nothing you'd choose but there it is in every house. I wanted to cry.

Freefall in a perfect circle, hands locked, twins who have never touched finally touching, the path that means I cannot leave you and I cannot reach you and I am defined by exactly this distance.

Everything soft, refracted, sealed an actor, a jealous man, a knife, the money the knife wanted, the boat the money would buy, and the man standing in the boat. Standing in the boat. What is the boat for?

At twelve this felt like death. At thirty it feels like the ocean.

You have to go through the void to find the garden. You have to lose the bubble to become the cup what was taken out of you is now the shape that holds.

And at the end I am lying on the road, my whole body given back to the air — breasts falling sideways, white skin, tufted dark, the geography of a self with no one left inside it.

The flowers were real. The psychedelic afternoons, the books, the worlds she handed me like fruit — all of it was real, and then one moment, small as a second, rewrote the architecture. I didn't bleed. I didn't scream. It was just a hand, just a moment, just the darkness that lives inside ordinary light and suddenly the house was on a different planet, and I was on it, keeping secrets, playing my games alone in rooms that used to be magic. I blamed myself for changing. That was the year I learned what uncanny means in the body that life is darker than you knew and you are briefly, terribly awake to it.

In the dream there was a man wrapped in bandages, leaking, wanting a hug, and I gave it.

My student's sister was shot dead in her home and my student came back to school. This is the only thing I know how to give. Not the feeling of her pain in my chest that's for me, that's mine, that costs her nothing. But the refusal to make her something that wouldn't happen to me.

Here is what the house gave me underneath the harm: the knowledge that a moment can rewrite a world, and still the world continues. The flowers were still real. You can hold both. That is what I learned going quiet in those rooms, learning early that beauty does not protect you, that magic is not armor, that the uncanny lives right at the center of the places you love most and that you can still enter them.

the color you are is not purple. The steps up to the museum where I remembered I had a body and the body was full of something the color of bruised plum, of almost- blood, of the feeling before crying that lives in the throat like a stone trying to become a word.

Names that press the solar plexus the way a thumb finds a bruise

The bar sits in the seam between a food court and an old corridor lined with student art and forgotten flyers. Every time I walk past, it’s a different organism sometimes heaving with bodies, sometimes hollow as a swimming pool out of season.

Today, it’s busy. Acquaintances glow inside under brewery lights.

Later, when the noise thins out I go back and sit alone at a corner table.

I check my bank account. Not enough. I call my mother and ask for money so I can buy a single drink and not feel like a ghost at my own table. She says no. That I’m slipping back into old habits, that she’s worried about my drinking.

That familiar puppet she pulls down from the high shelf when she needs a story. But the distance between what she sees and what I live through is a hallway I will never finish walking.

The truth is simpler and lonelier

I try to explain how too much contact makes my nerves flicker, how being pleasant is its own kind of labor, how I need to collapse into my strangeness makeup wiped off, clothes dropped in a trail to the nearest surface.

They call it depression. But it’s just saturation, a cup filled past the point of surface tension

In the bar, the lights shift from gold to something flatter. A man on a stool watches the doorway.

Every system these days assumes the worst of me machines, families, even the ones who say they care. A glitch in some program somewhere, and suddenly I’m a case file, a name to be flagged, a story rewritten by people who don’t know how to read me.

Someone texts in a panic about their own disaster a relationship that spilled out of its container, a situation already beyond repair and I’m expected to decode it, to make sense of feelings they can barely speak. I try, but the messages blur; I learn again how often confusion is mistaken for indifference.

Old enemies surface in new rooms. My past sits at my in-laws’ table, smiling, and I am framed before the food is served. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t do it; what matters is how easy it is to believe that I did.

Meanwhile there are always tests official, spiritual, familial. Written questions with unclear criteria, rooms where other people seem born prepared. Sometimes I glimpse something larger, a purpose that feels like a lit chamber in the body of the world and it thrills me, overwhelms me. But awe has never been enough to make anyone understand me better.

Things are taken from me without warning. A raid, a decision, a rule I didn’t know existed. Someone else’s authority reaches into my hands and pulls away what is soft. I scream after what I love, no one even turns.

Fires start small and become arguments. I say don’t put it there, and he does, and afterward he tells me I should be grateful for the damage he almost caused.

Someone makes a joke so ugly it tastes metallic in the air. I say this is not okay. Others pretend nothing happened. In the car before a party, I ask him to stand with me in truth for one minute, but he keeps the door open, keeps the conversation shut.

I meet people who claim to remember me better than I remember myself.

Hawai'i dissolving into a roadside field. My mother whispers of warnings, of death moving closer.

She tells me love does not matter at the beginning that it’s meant to bloom later, if at all.

Some part of me prepares to be the last witness to my own life.

There are things I encounter that repel me a form of innocence so warped I can’t pretend to love it.

Doctors wheel me toward a procedure without asking, their hands steady, their voices rehearsed. “Go to sleep,” they say.

I.

I told them to wait.

But she kept writing leaned over the desk, her effort tumbling ahead of my words. So I reached for the page and tore it clean down the middle, telling her to stop.

Then she slid sideways into my isolation as if being alone made me suspect.

And I felt myself scrambling to prove I am not what they fear I might be. To prove I belong in the place I stand every day

II.

She crossed it without hesitation, just the sound of paper parting.

A small correction became a wound, and the wound became a story about identity, about power, about what I might carry unknowingly in my hands.

I found myself trying to step back into the light

It is strange, the way a single moment can open a door you never meant to approach

III.

I’ve been keeping a life like a ledger columns of order, boxes checked, measured hours stacked. Lately the sums won’t balance. Something slips from my hands each day: a message unanswered, a promise postponed, a piece of myself shelved for later. I tell myself it’s fine, it's fine, this is just what happens when you work hard.

I walk through the rooms I built with such care: a steady job, a schedule that doesn’t crumble, relationships tended like low-maintenance plants. Everything is good. Everything is good.

Sometimes, without warning, a different version of me surfaces, the one who once walked home at seventeen with a heart blazing toward a future only she could see, collecting moments like talismans: the warmth of friends pressed close, the way meaning seemed to glint from every ordinary street.

She asks me When did you stop believing you deserved more than safety?

And I want to answer her honestly. I’ve always chased security like a lifeline, the mother I needed near, the friendships I could rest inside, the job that wouldn’t vanish overnight, a borrowed certainty when my own ran thin.

security hardened into a shape I learned to live inside, a routine so clean it left no space

I’ve reached the version of life I used to pray for, and I haven’t asked myself in years what I want next, or whether I believe I deserve to want at all.

And slowly, the child in me steps out from behind the years

I.

This year my body became a faulty circuit little shocks moving under the skin, as if someone backstage kept testing the lights.

Food felt like an argument. Alcohol felt like a key that fit too many locked doors. Every buzz became a small myth Now something important might happen, my nerves whispered, while the rest of me tried to stay upright.

I made it through the collisions: all the fault lines of spring.

I haven’t let myself feel contentment— it’s a language I understand but refuse to speak. Even arousal startles me, rising in my body like a stranger knocking at the wrong door.

At twelve, I stepped out of myself as easily as leaving a room. My voice thinned, my edges blurred. The story kept moving, but I wasn’t in the frame.

Now, as an adult, I keep touching the glass between me and the life unfolding. Alcohol wipes the surface clean for a moment I’m included, heard, lit from within. Then the glass fogs again.

I miss believing that the world had secret choreography that people arrive on cue, that a story chooses you.

the dark corners where childhood doctrines still crouch, the imagined hand on my shoulder when the lights go out.

II.

heart spikes, buzzing limbs

I haven’t let myself feel content, because contentment feels like a trap a way to get caught off guard. If my body wants something, my instinct is to slam the door.

I know where it started. Twelve years old. Voice disappearing. Body shrinking. Everyone else getting scripts while I got stage fright and silence.

It shuts up the voice that says don’t bother, they don’t care. It pretends to be magic and I keep falling for it.

I still avoid doctors, friends, cleaning, anything that requires me to see myself clearly.

I’m still here. That’s bite enough.

III.

the delicate knots of other people’s families.

I miss trusting people. I miss the early friendships that felt like unlikely gifts.

IV.

I.

The day begins before I do the familiar impulse to fix everything before anyone asks.

I work with a devotion that looks like pride but feels like fear. I take on too much, hoping effort might substitute for belonging, hoping silence won’t be mistaken for emptiness.

Meanwhile, old wounds mutter beneath the floorboards— memories I pressed downward still shaping the way I brace for impact. I forget that intuition has its own vocabulary, that I don’t need permission to trust myself.

So I speak less than I mean, offer half-formed ideas, compare myself to ghosts who seem more confident than I’ve ever been. Somewhere in the giving-away of power, I misplaced my faith in my own voice.

II.

I return to work already behind carry everything, ask for nothing.

Underneath, memories I buried still steering my hands.

self-belief becomes a rumor.

I see threats where there are only humans.

I tell myself pleasure requires binge nights, that discipline is a cage

fear, old bones in old closets.

Something is missing, yes.

III.

I handed my power away in exchange for approval I never received. I compared myself until I disappeared.