Home

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Some days when the rain patters against the small window of our bedside, I think it's you speaking to me. Through the tapping and shaking of the window pane, I hear your sighs and I hear your screams. In the gentle light of a spring shower, you giggle. Through the cold and caliginous dark of a storm, you wretch and moan.

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They say that home is where the heart is. I have been homeless for some time.

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I like to think I'm diseased. That a terrible mental illness took me those years ago. Twisted my thinking, clouded my mind. You said you saw through me, though. Said that when you peered into my eyes, I had always been this way. That I was born this person - weak, insufferable, and malformed. In that moment, a cloud cleared for me. I saw through you too.

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That knowledge ignited something in me. Something I wish was sickness, or a bout of hysteria. But it wasn't. In the right situation, we are all capable of the most terrible crimes.

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Tonight, you knock against the window again. I listen and tap my fingers to your rhythm. I can't explain, but you feel closer every night. I see you in the shadow of the open pantry door. When the rain has ceased, your footfalls are the creaking of pipes. The whirring of the air conditioner is your breath. Each day you breach further into this house. Each day I am farther from home.

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I know that you are the mold. It grows up in every dark pocket. Relentless. No ground is too sacred, and no place a safehaven. Is it you which I feel growing in my mind? The tips of your fungus eroding at my soft tissue, clawing for purchase in my skull? Sometimes I try to breath as deeply as I can, to let you in. Haste you along. Let you crowd my airways and find purchase in my throat.

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When I slammed your head into the corner of the fireplace I was so certain you'd be gone. But now you're here. You're here so often, so unmistakably, that we are as one thing. One being.

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This run down shack is never going to be my home again. Nor will the one across the street, or across the state, or across the ocean. But I am your home now, aren't I? Your last vessel to cling to on this miserable rock. Every footfall I make leaves your spores. Every sound that reaches my ears you listen.

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But I've destroyed a home before. Do you smell the gasoline? Can you taste it? Can you feel it running on our skin? Pound away at the windows. Flicker your lights. Do anything you want.

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If I can't keep my home, neither can you.