It looks like a house. It has four walls and a roof, windows dressed in brightly colored curtains and an American Flag blowing out front
but the tarnished cement on the walkway, the chipped paint on the front door, the broken screen, the overgrown garden and the lonely lawn chairs warn that this is not a house.
Mountains of memories plague every opening- obstruct any attempt to walk from room to room.
A two hundred dollar telescope sits cold and unused in the dining room buried in the middle of papers and bills never paid.
The shower stands naked- pipes showing beneath a clumsily placed plastic bag. Tiles peel and hope to be uprooted away from cat litter thrown from untidy pets.
Closets shelter coats long out of fashion and toddler toys unfit for a now 12 year old boy.
He comes home from school, sits down and sighs.
He does his homework on the floor- his desk buried beneath old children's books and computer paper.
There is a couch that sits bare in the living room with cushions stained and sunken in- holding place for a heavy body that lounges with eyes shut.
My mother dances around it all, feet feeling for holes to fit into from kitchen to bathroom to bed.
Her path is formed like footprints in snow.
She sleeps surrounded by discarded perfume bottles and dresses three sizes too small.
A small black urn sits sadly beneath a battered TV- if only he could watch her from beneath the debris.
The washer and dryer still clean her clothes and the bathroom still washes away sweat from busy days-
But she knows this is not a house.
No more dinner parties with familiar faces.
No more meals served on the kitchen table- now a holding place for boxes and unopened presents from holidays past.
No more sleep over parties in the basement- comfy couches now corroded by seven years of mold and wreckage from a small flood.
No more Christmas tree dimly lighting the living room since a Best Buy box now occupies its space- broken down and filled with forgotten pogs and Pokemon videos.
The house holds it all up with accepting planks and brick- it is stronger than she is.
Secretly she wishes the house would fall down. Secretly she wishes she would be inside it.
Sometimes I want to bring flowers to lay in front of this messy grave,
But my family still breathes inside the tomb that theyβve made.