Home by Halcyon

It looks like you’re on your own tonight. You’re back Home. Your mother shed your old cocoon the moment you left all those months ago. A collage of songs you used to love and the smells of fabric softener from your old clothes waft into your room from the vent. You arrive hungry, with a heartache. Marooned on the ship inside an impossible bottle. This happens every time.

The scabs char over your skin when you redecorate the eggshell walls for the fifth day in a row. You rearrange the inside of your catacomb with papier-mâché. No matter how vibrant, the sun bleaches the colors to sepia toned smears and shrivels the room like a raisin. The shiny has-beens that trickle from your bedroom blinds, broken glass tinsels, are everywhere but you can’t bring yourself to touch them.

It isn’t any different outside, either. The sky is severed into perfect rectangle’d spaces. You can see their weight drooping like pregnant bellies above you. You don’t go outside. Not when you’re Home. Not that you could face the front door laced with rusted barbed wire, dicing you on the spot. Not that Home was the first place you’d ever thought to leave whole. Home, with its fishing pole reeling you back to its tower.

Let your eyes roll along the pavement as dead leaves spill onto the front yard like loaded dice. You learned at Home, you could never really save anything. Or spare the grater from itching your brain. The afternoons abandoned your hill faster than you could savor the night. Staying awake driving absently like an ant marching a muddy maze, trying to salvage lost time. Fry your eyes with neon light hypnosis, drug store popsicles, and marijuana. You don’t have to remember any of it. Not that anyone would notice. 

You eat everything in sight without putting anything in your mouth. Fingers twitch in fear like a metronome tick. Your muscles scream and your belly wheezes, gasping the debris. Something brays behind your ear; makes you want to leave. Not that you could help it or stop the tension in your shoulders when a laughter from the kitchen light sneers at your back. You feel tense, guilty even, and toss your body on the bed like a spineless book in your room of molding walls and wet linen you so desperately tried to conceal. At this point you realize you weren’t really any different when you left; you mummified everything you could touch. Home hid inside your new closet with all your dusty trophies and broken windpipes. Home followed. Home taunted, and you could do nothing about it.

But it looks like you’re on your own tonight. Looks like you’re making churches out of toothpicks, stuffing tombstones in shoe boxes. The last place of you outlined in chalk, rolled into a stick of incense, burning for hours.