my house is no longer a home

no matter how many tears are soaked into sheets and

memories are stained into walls that still echo from the screams,

shadowed by couches covered in firsts with summer boys

and splattered with regret from all the times I couldn’t say no

or when fingers closed around my throat and held me up 

with love dripping from the arches of my feet

and through the carpet

the rafters

the plumbing.

the pipes always clang

and we can say it’s air in the lines but maybe it’s all that love that leaked out

fighting against plywood and foam and trying to find its way back to a place that filled in with gravel a long time ago.

this house is no longer the way that the light shines through it in the summer, 

turning the walls a shade of blue that only I could fall for.

it is not the footprints I left from dancing

making myself dizzy and drunk while I was alone and had the volume on max.

it is not the crocuses that used to peek through tree roots every April

or favorite dresses put into storage

or the way you can always see rainbows from the corner of the porch.

I came to realize that sometimes

a person becomes like a home 

when I feel safer with them than I do in my own bed

and I make playlists in the dark out of their voice until I have memorized every song 

and they’re all the same

like the wind in the trees that used to live in my backyard

and the warmth that spreads across your skin when you step out of the shade and into the sun 

and the stars when you see them

–  really see them –

for the first time.

and you know that it’s happened when you want to spill your secrets to them like milk and f*** not crying over it because you have to cry over it so you can finally feel like it’s all out of you

and so they could understand that all you need is to feel okay again

and they make that just a little bit easier,

just enough easier that you never want to leave.

and you want to show them your stars and tell them why you love the Pleiades most even though you used to get them confused with Delphinus 

and why sunrises are a thousand times better because they’re soft and slow and so much more like falling in love 

and sunsets are too bloody to be anything but heartbreak.

my house is no longer a home because these walls have seen too much.

this is just the place where I lost all of my trust for the one person who was never supposed to hurt me that way.

the place where I learned that love and hate walk hand in hand on a line so fine you can’t even see it.

sometimes I imagine that the pipes have burst

and I’m standing in water up to my ankles

knees

hips

waist

neck

and it’s up over my nose now

and all I have to do is reach for the door

and let all the bad flow out

but if I do I’ll be carried out with it and I could never come back.

so while I choke and cling to my last breath

I daydream

that I’ll grab my stars and my suitcase

and take up refuge in someone else

because I turn people 

into houses

when I go home 

and only feel lost.