I now enter this house as a ghost. I shift through its rooms to observe scenes all familiar to me; I lived a life here before. But even then I was not home. This house was no sanctuary for me. It was instead a labyrinth of unkindly memories and inexplicable behavior. This house was the stage upon which my mother and I’s relationship was chipped and eroded to a rotting thing. A woman who couldn’t understand me, a child who couldn’t understand what “mommy” is supposed to mean. A parent scrabbling for answers never given to her, a child held accountable for the questions. Disfunction. Rotting wood. Moldy bread, moldy tiles. The moths in the cabinet, their larvae in the food. The bugs ate the clothes. Decomposition. A house possessed, walls possessed, aching to become dirt again. A child aching to be dirt again. Smoke and mirrors, dissociation, no place where trust lives. A wild animal in the house, but who is it, you or me? She said it was always me, always me. A stage, set with a woman snapping at the seams. A child locked in the audience, there’s nowhere else to go. A child becomes a needle to sew it all up again. But children are not needles, children cannot lead all this thread. A dead thing, reanimated. A puppet to play a trick on me. A puppet to convince me of something untrue. Somebody told me lies, the house kept the lies in its walls, in its holes, in its plaster. The house, her accomplice, the house, her prisoner too. I did get out. I did leave. And finally I slept through the night. I pity the house, I think it wants to die. Or maybe it wants to be alive again, like it was before. Lies and walls can’t hurt a ghost anymore. I enter the door and I peer across the dust-washed surfaces, she cannot keep me here, but I can still see the scenes to the play. This old play, this old act, I feel its memory in the hardwood. I took photos of it all. Can you see the memory too?