I’ve always thought that buildings are like graveyards for memories;
The dead preserved between walls like flowers pressed in pages,
The lost parts of our selves hung up like portraits or calendars; Reminding us of our lives.
I’ve taken to wondering about why we got our kitchen re-done
While we let the rest of our house fall apart
And I think I’ve found the answer.
We don’t want to remember our dead.
Over the summer we striped back the tiles
And painted the walls with sunshine;
The washing machine and the microwave migrated
And the floor space receded
To make way for all our cupboards to be empty.
We dragged the evidence out into the yard
And scribbled over it like it was a spelling mistake.
The kitchen was the room where we’d all died several times over
And so the cemetery had to be uprooted and annihilated
Before we began to smell the decay of the past versions of ourselves.
We had to prise mould from the corners
And resolutely redecorate the place where Anorexia had been most prominent.
It was ironic really
That this purge was to rid ourselves of Anorexia When purging had, so frequently, been a means of feeding it.
It was pointless really
Because the kitchen might have been the part of the house that got bombed the most heavily by my brother’s eating disorder
But it was not the only room with bullet holes punching through the paintwork.
Each wall is avalanched away by postcards and snapshots and letters home
That my fourteen-year-old -self framed with fear and anger and hate.
What my home means to me is the bed I saw my mother howling on
And the scales my brother teetered on
And the doorway my father swore from.
When I see the painting on my brother’s wall
I think not of art but of a children’s hospital
And when I see my blue bean bag
I think not of film-watching but of the practise of crying tearlessly.
We know a family who lived in the same little Mental-Illness-Bubble that we did.
“We’ve still got the lamp shade that she threw her plate of tomato pasta at,”
They say whenever we see them.
“We have a good laugh about that,”
And they explain the way they deal with their history
Like the person who taught them optimism did a better job with them than ours did with us.
We’re four cynics crouching under one roof
Like we’d rust in the rain that we miser over.
Unable to move on.
We attempt but it is too hard, too rigid, too stiff.
My joints have more titanium than my grandmother’s –
No, not titanium; lead.
Every time I try to step away from anorexia
I find that there is too much grit behind my patella,
Too much debris lodged between my brittled bones.
Debris that’s left over from all the toxins and dirt and tears that I couldn’t manage to cry.
I hug myself on the staircase and wonder
How many years it will be before I can watch the front door without watching for dying Crane Flies.
How many times must I sit opposite my brother before I can forget sitting opposite a skeleton?
How long will it take to stop seeing ***** stains in the toilet and the writhing veins in my brother’s arms?
I’m waiting for the day when we can throw away blood-stained lampshades
And remember instead how, as children, we threw paper aeroplanes down these stairs.
It was always my brother’s plane that flew the furthest.
Sorry this is so long.
It was for school: "What does home mean to you?"