this is your house (this is not your home) // renelena

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ike every morning, my brain reassures me I’m awake in a flash of colours and pictures before my body even knows it. (Hello,) I’m greeted by my thoughts, (welcome to today.) As the rest of me catches up, I can feel warmth and light begin to trickle through my uncovered window, reaching first my feet and then running up my legs, pooling in my stomach and hands, and forming eddies around my chest. I stretch out my toes, letting the happy symbols behind my still closed eyes pass by without recognition. I take a deep breath, greeting all the aromas of the day.
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The light, dry smell of sawdust reminds me of trotting beside my father on one of his security checks of the District delivery site, where the newly constructed wooden bays looked like giant {beehives}. In contrast, the odour of the damp in the ceiling is cold, blue – a bass note accompanied by spiralling tracks of hallucinated {ants} as I think of the hard work that will be required to fix it. (Not by us.) Behind them both, I can smell the piled trash outside every house on our street, so potent it finds its way through the cracks in our house and hangs in the air like a confession. So many leftovers, every night. I think of the poverty only blocks away from me and feel a pang of guilt. Guilt is an {apple}, taking me back to (sneaking into my mother’s study, getting caught reading a gilded book so deteriorating its pages were almost ash, a man, a woman, an apple and the snake-)
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Suddenly, the memory implodes in my mind, and what’s left is no longer the image of my younger self facing my mother, wide-eyed and clinging to the book, but facing something else, something much, much harder to stomach than guilt.
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Him.
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Though I haven’t seen him for what feels like years, he’s in my dreams almost every night. That’s what tends to happen when my brain makes a new connection, like my imagination is revising it over and over again. Revisiting our encounters in such diamond clarity that I know the steps off by heart, that I hear the rasp of his voice in every scraping door, crunch of gravel, choleric cough, (that when I look at myself in the mirror I sometimes see his face staring back…) And yet, it scares me just to say his name out loud – or even in my thoughts. It’s almost as if its invocation will bring him here to me in another of our seemingly random meetings.
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By the time I open my eyes, I’m no longer basking in the light and the prospects of the morning. I can feel my stomach knotting itself like rope, and my fingers have the suggestion of a tremble. I push the sheets down from around my chest and set one foot on the floor, fighting the phantom serpents slithering behind my retinas and circling around my mind, tighter and tighter until my imagination itself is suffocating in the vision of him. My breath catches. Bright flashes fizzle and leap in the room in front of me, each accompanied by a colour, sound, smell that I can barely discern. Nausea takes over and I keel forwards, first doubling over out of the bed and onto my knees, and then carried even further forwards by my momentum so I'm lying flat on my stomach on the wooden floorboards. Consciousness feels like a boulder resting on the nape of my neck, and the longer I lie on the floor, surrendering to my overactive and terrified mind, the harder it is to bear. Blackness seeps into my sight like treacle, and faster than falling asleep, I've drowned in it.
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I awake, dewy with perspiration, and almost wretch at the iron taste in my mouth. A crusty smear of blood sticks my cheek to the floorboards, and on peeling my face away I discover it's turned the blonde ends of my hair bronze as well. Further mental exploration reveals I must have bit my tongue on collapse, because every time I breathe the pain hits me like a whiplash from that epicentre. Shakily, I push myself up onto my knees and crawl towards the door. The noises of the morning have died down and rain clouds are even starting to consider forming in the sky. (That'll refresh me, and make me forget the beginning of this day,) I muse, and with determination stagger to the stairs.
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My mother barely notices me as I splash my face with water, pull a large wool jumper over my nightdress and march hastily for the door. My best shoes, left by the porch after some gala or event, are a juxtaposition with the rest of my outfit, but I don't even think about it. I'm outside and walking down the street just as the first rain starts to fall.
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(What are you doing?) I ask myself but my feet don't stop moving. (Where are you going?) My brain sends out a distress flare to my eyes and ears, filling them with swarms of concerned and anxious symbols. I don't stop. (What are you looking for? What do you want?) What do I want? But the longer I've been moving, the further I get from home, the more certain I am.
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I'm going to stop my nightmares. Face my fears.
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I'm going to find him.
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