HOUSE

You were like a blanket of fear.
I was afraid to take you off but just as afraid if not more so to keep you on.
 It was cold most nights and lonely even though it was heavy and overcrowded.
 I hated you.
 I hated the thought that you home and I hated what you had done to my family.  
You broke me.  
Your walls were thin and bare and most of the time the quietness that once consumed my nights had been overtaken by the sobbing of my sister and I and the relentless creaking of my mother’s bed.
 I wanted so bad to wake up and realize that this was just a nightmare that I had yet to awaken from.  
But day after day it wasn’t.  
You consumed my mother.  
Forced her to become someone I barely recognized.
 Ive never forgiven you.  
Ill never forgive you.
She was mean, angry, hurtful and scared.
 Her days were uncertain and so were mine.
 Were we going to eat?
 How much more money was I going to owe the convenience store clerk for yet another box of macaroni and cheese?  
How many more hours would I spend alone waiting for mom to come home from work?  
Was she really at work?
 I wished you’d burn down.
 Maybe if you didn’t exist, neither would this life.  
I needed you to not exist.
 You took my innocence.  
Soon my mother would become so angry that every little thing would set her off.
 I learned to be silent because it seemed like everything I said made everything worse, I wanted to be invisible.  
But I wasn’t.
 I was far from it and she could see me.
 But could she really? She couldn’t have really seen me because I was her baby and how could she have hurt her baby?  
The angrier you made her the worse it got for me.
 The spankings turned into beatings and the beatings turned into blackouts.  
But there you were like a blanket over us.  
A darkness that only allowed light in through small fragmented cracks in my soul.
 I chose to forget your surroundings.
 Empty hollow streets that poverty had overtaken long before I arrived.
 I hated you.
I hated the way the bathroom smelled from the unfortunate depression of my mother’s lack of interest in cleaning anything.  
I hated the dirty clothes I was forced to wear because she couldn’t be bothered to launder them.
 I hated the bitter cold draft that crept through the windows in the winter and crisp fall nights. I hated the revolving door that become my mother’s way of life.
 But most of all I hated you.
 It was easier this way, though.  
Once we left, I could leave everything that had become us behind.  
I could put it in a little box in my mind and categorize it as you.
 I didn’t have to let it follow me to the next chapter of my life.  
Parts of you would always be in me but I chose to put you in a box.  
A dark lingering box that no matter how hard I tried I have carried.  
I was wrong though.  
You still powered over my  mother.  
The beatings only got worse and I became hardened by my inability to stop them.  
Maybe if it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t still hate her.  
Maybe I it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t still be hardened.
 I still wear you sometimes.
 I find myself back in that house hoping for a better truth but I always find the same sorrow.
The same darkness.