I moved back into the home I grew up in.
My room is just as i left it:
paintings on the coffee table
and peeling stickers on the ceiling,
broken lamp barely standing
and discarded scraps of paper that litter my floor like autumn leaves.
My room embodies everything I have been
since I inherited it at 7 years old.
It has the fragility of the child I used to be, the reckless mess of who I was when I left, and the solemn shattering of the girl who broke her own heart and never cleaned the shards from the floor.
I still find those shards in the skin at the bottom of my feet
from time to time.
I can never bring myself to throw them away for good
so I put them back on the floor,
making a mental note to be more careful where I step next time.
I find poems I wrote at 13,
poems that were written for me at 14,
photographs of those I once loved and those I no longer recognise.
This room is a  hollow tomb,
home to the ghost of the girl I once was.