Andie.ink

This isn’t my childhood home. Some people are used to moving and while we did when I was young, I spent 27 years with my parents in one house. We built it. My brother was on the construction team. I watched it grow from a hill to a home. I remember the day my parents drove us out to the property to show us where we would live.
We filled that house with … a lot. Some of it beautiful. It welcomed home my parent’s first two grandchildren. It heard laughter and joy. Some of it devastating and painful and almost tore us apart. Those are not my stories to tell.
It sits empty now. Age caught up to my parents even though they’d successfully held it back for years by raising their eldest grandchild. Less space, less stairs, less… was needed.
Empty. Filled with the remnants of my past and my parent’s history. It’s like a morgue for a couple still alive. It sits echoing the sounds of the past and whispering to itself the stories it’s walls have witnessed. My home sits like a ship lost at sea on the floor of the murky seabed mourning and waiting.
For what to come?
Tonight we rest in my parent’s new home. It is not my home. For me it feels like going to a grandparents retirement home where things are slightly familiar, but they only touch on the past like an old grey haired woman who can’t quite remember which of her children is which. There are faint traces of the familiar in pieces of furniture and photographs. This house is sterile and infantile. It hiccups and stalls as it tries to bring forth the feelings of comfort. But it can’t quite get the feelings to muster.
Some people say both are just houses built with wood and screws.
But for an adopted girl with trauma and abandonment issues, one has been my refuge and the other is a cold prison cell. I haven’t been to the old house in months. If I go, I know I’ll break open. So I come here and play pretend. I pretend it’s ok. I pretend this feels like home. I pretend I’m not loosing the safest place on earth for me. To some homes are just buildings, but to others they are a history book. One that holds the secrets and the answers to life’s questions but only gives them up fickly if under the influence of honest love.