My Childhood Home is Haunted
**Trigger warning: suicide attempt, physical abuse**
It was always there.
Perhaps it began with the overgrown raspberry bushes, their spiky leaves and vines climbed up the wall towards my bedroom window. Maybe it was the knocking on walls, my brother and I in separate rooms for the first time, our childhood Morse code to continue a conversation that felt too important to wait for tomorrow. Or the bloodstains from where my other brother fell through the stained glass panel of the front door, my first memory swimming in crimson and fear. It could have been buried in the old yellow paint, lime green linoleum, leaking avocado fridge, brown and orange shag carpet.
I don’t know if it came before or after us. I used to see things. Sleep paralysis demons and faces peeking into my window at night. But I was a little girl, awake in a room by herself, often feverish and uncomfortable.
I lived there for eighteen years, the best of times and the worst of times, as it goes. Playing with muddled red and blue Play Doh with my brothers, making pretend restaurants as we stirred waffle batter and chased each other through the narrow hallway with the soft yellow wallpaper. A few years later, running down that same hallway away from my father as he tried to rip my hair out and beat me. He pulled the pocket off of my favorite pair of jeans as I tried to escape, but we didn’t believe in locked doors and he was unhappy with something I had done, as usual.
Maybe my memories are the ghosts.
It could be my next door neighbor, my brother’s childhood best friend who joined the military right out of high school, only to be shot and killed in Arizona just a few years ago.
Or my grandmother who didn’t often make it over, depression confining her to her smoky apartment, but when she did come over, it was always the brightest of days in my memory.
Maybe one of the two drive-by shootings actually hit something besides piercing our expensive glass window and instilling in me the knowledge that nowhere in the world was safe.
I moved out at seventeen and then back in, when the generous family that had taken me in insisted that I attend church with them. The devil you know, and all that. I returned to the bedroom that my parents had filled with all of their stuff, fumes from my father’s attempts to refinish the hardwood clouding my mind, and tried to commit suicide in the same bathtub I used to splash and play in when I was the age my son is now.
I survived it, obviously.
But, maybe some of me didn’t, that energy signature of being left behind and trapped in a town full of dead ends too strong to dissipate as I moved the last pieces of me into a crappy apartment a few streets over to live with a boyfriend I didn’t love and a best friend I would lose before the end of our cohabitation.
My parents sold the house for twice what they paid for it and moved to Texas, a better fit for their conservative nature. And I kept moving on, moving away, avoiding that place that held my greatest hopes and most painful failures.
It was bought by a little Mexican family, the dad worked at a local business and I still remember the day my mother called to tell me that he hanged himself in the backyard, on the tree I planted with my grandmother, feet away from where my childhood pets were all buried. Another ghost to walk the halls.
I haven’t been back once, though it’s only a couple towns away. I look it up on Google Street View and it looks lonely, beckoning me to enter it’s four walls once again, but I resist. I keep running.
It’s all a symptom, I think. Of struggling to stay above water in a town that is perpetually sinking. I got out.
When I was a child, I dreamed of secret doorways, a whole section of the attic where there were memories of previous occupants instead of the old fiberglass and mouse droppings that my father swore were up there. Sometimes in my dreams now I still walk through that space, intersecting with the child who would endure so much to make it out of there, and then I wake up.
I fear the day I don’t.
