carried away

i realise how crazy this sounds, but i often define myself in terms of the house i grew up in. the family home i lived in growing up.

and by this i mean it's physical structure- from the foundations, to the green-tiled roof so drastically aged, it scarcely protected the inside from the outside; not from the elements, nor from mine and my sisters’ determined suitors scampering their way across, and the more persistent ones, through.

so how to explain? how best to tell you how there are times i become my childhood home?

well, see there are some days i feel cold and inside, like the dining room located first door on the right as you entered the house, number three half way up the hill.

i don't know if you're wondering, but it is more than my mood i'm describing to you here. on those days i don't feel the way that room used to make me feel, i'm not describing an emotion elicited from a back catalogue of memories evoked by certain things on particular days, i mean i feel like i am that room.

my head is the south facing window, just like those in the room right above it, my childhood bedroom incidentally, the one i shared with my older sister before we renovated and i had one on my own.

oh, are you still with me here? i can get carried away.

my eyes become the couch-bound cushions i dared never to remove from that room, not because the patchwork was hand quilted, nor because they bore any historical significance, nor because there was a fragility sewn into the ornate design, though there was, but because i swear to you as though they were complying to scientific law, those cushions would invariably find their way back to that room if ever they did momentarily stray, which i never even once in my 24 years saw them do.

so yes, i suppose you could say i perpetuated my own obedience by leaving the cushions that were always there left, but it was the way my eyes saw it back then, and the way they become those cushions as they see them now.

and what of those walls?

my flesh becomes those walls. my skin tingles with the texture i can only describe to you as i felt them back then, navigating my way hands outstretched in the dark, on the nights too hot to sleep in my own room, (you would have found at the top of the stairs turning right), lucidly cool and idiosyncratically goose-bumped; i could effortlessly feel my way across the flaws to the other side.

by day the surface of the walls was a landscape neglected by the imagination- mission brown, lacquered by a tradesman in a hurry, flawed not by design or purpose, but by oversight.

i only think of this now, though even this strikes me as implausible. i could only really know it now to have known it then.

i must have known it then.

but there are other days of course, i feel my belly heave up its driveway to the front porch, the rickety cast-iron door is unlocked - it was always unlocked - and if my heart is inside, it is the kitchen bench, waiting for my mouth to arrive home from school with stories that only just escape between treats gobbled down.

my heart is that now.