A Room Once Called Yours

Four years worth of dust collected in the center of a room you once called yours. And the furniture’s gone, but the bed frame left an imprint in the floor that will be a reminder to those who might find all the traces of trying a life leaves behind. And I’ve gone back and forth on it one thousand times, but I can’t seem to make sense of how I got here. And since I moved back home, I haunt the attic where I hid away in as a child. And now I do the same. Peering out from shelves that line a hallway’s worth of old family photos, compact discs and and crates of assignments unfinished or turned in too late. And the floorboards are buckling under the weight of the ghosts I’ve been dragging around. So why do we decide to leave when what we really wanna do is stay? And when all we want to do is sleep, we force ourselves awake. And we keep our distance from the things we long to be close to. And we contradict the things we know and try our best to prove the opposite. You can paint over patches, scrub all the scratches from the dirty hardwood floor. Take down the paintings, never erasing what has haunted these hallways before. Empty your wallets, fill up your closets. Is it a privilege or a chore? Do what you damn well please, it won’t bother me. I don’t live there anymore.