I walk a broken and empty hallway. The paint on the walls peel underneath the sticky heat of summer. The things they’ve witnessed. The fights they’ve seen, it tore them apart inside. But they weren’t alone. The floors cracked underneath the pressure of carrying them all afloat and the shattered pictures adorning the wood stretched thoroughly across the hall. Inside the frame a picture perfect nuclear family, before the explosion- the destruction of springtime bliss. It was their legacy, they’ve carried it in their family tree. A canvas cut from the same cloth, disease woven in the strands-genetics are the heaviest chains to get rid of.
Home was a place I could never escape, it’s one that I’m tied to undeniably, even now. By returning I hoped that when I looked in the mirror I wouldn’t see my fathers cold gaze. That I wouldn’t hear the rasp in mother’s voice against my own. Maybe, just maybe, I could escape it if I could discover closure, wherever it may be. Every step of this journey into the unknown has been overwhelming. From the first doorway’s greeting to the windows spilling under the burning, beating sun; it all wrapped me in a heat so deep I melted against it. Maybe I made a mistake and the truth is better untouched, far away and never revealed. But my legs still drive heavily into the wood and lead me through the house.
And suddenly, it all rushed back into me, crashed down on my skin, filling my body and staining my bones. In a haze, the light from a yellow windowpane spread across three large mahogany chests like a thick blanket, hiding them. My legs lost all strength within and crumpled underneath my body as I found myself face to face with the past. I pushed the latch back and opened the wooden container to reveal the remains.
On the ride home I stared out the window at the golden fields of wheat. They moved away from the house with such urgency, it’s as if they knew. The people that roamed that house had dragged behind me at every step, always weighing heavily on my conscience. As their prisoner I endured torture for years that seemed endless, but that was all before, before I wiped them from my memory, and from life itself.