Rooms

There were no words to be had.

None that could accurately and completely describe the true depths to which my heart had been inflicted with their disappearance. They did not come home.

I was alone, and it was my new reality. It settled over me with the slow certainty of something that would not lift. Something that I did not choose but was thrust onto me with little regard for how irrevocable orphanhood was.

I needed them.

And, they were taken from me.

When I entered our home for the first time since they left me, it all felt… off. The home that was large enough to host all our family turned into a house barely big enough for the weight of my frustration. I was old enough to be considered an adult. But I did not feel old enough to handle the adiposity of my lack of comprehension. Why did this happen? My thoughts repeated like a broken cassette tape. My thoughts felt clogged the same way the air did. Crammed. Lethargic. Every inhale felt like I had to wade through a thick syrup with a strong undercurrent that pushed me away. It made me aware of my own breathing in a way I never had been, like my body had to convince itself to keep going. I tried to grab the banister as if it might help my understanding. But the unmoving mass did not care how dazed I was.

I froze on the steps and was not even sure I wanted to climb them to the empty rooms of calamity. I had no desire to enter my own. There was no need to close the door to my sanctuary and await a patient knock. It might as well have become a crypt, and I considered locking myself in and dissipating into the loss. The few posters that hung in my room seemed to watch on with pity as I sat on my once comfortable bed. The room felt claustrophobic, but I had always been more of a minimalist. I could feel the palpitations in my chest quicken. A bead of cold sweat descended down my forehead and trapped itself in my brow. I needed to pack some things to live with my grandparents until college. But there was nothing here that felt worth taking. Nothing that would serve as anything but a reminder of a former life that I realized had always been as fragile as Mom’s porcelain collectibles. When I managed to stand on wobbly legs, I moved across the wall.

I grasped the doorknob to my parents’ room. And, for what felt like an eternity, I waited. Waited to wake up, or for them to open the door for me, or chime from my phone that they would be back soon. The metal was cold, as if the room itself had already sealed itself off from the world. It felt like touching the edge of sacredness and ruin.

Nothing came.

Subconsciously, I knew nothing ever would.

I could not bring myself to enter.

So, I walked down the hall on the second floor to the guest room. It was empty, but perfectly designed. Mom had a knack for leaving places in a state of awkward fulfillment for the random instance that someone might inhabit the spare room. I could not remember the last time someone had. And, there was nothing for me here. I knew there would not be. But, in a weird way, I just wanted to bid the spare room adieu.

From the bathroom, I expeditiously grabbed the few things that were purely necessary until I could afford replacements. Only toiletries: a toothbrush, deodorant, hair brush, and a few nearly empty containers of makeup. Survival items. Not mementos.

Then, I braved the stairs once more. Methodically. My only goal was not to trip over my own feet on the descent. I contemplated letting it happen. For a moment, I thought about what might happen if I let myself fall and hit the wall on the other side. Maybe I would see them again if that played out.

I strongly considered the act.

The thought didn’t frighten me as much as the silence that followed it.

But that is not what they would want.

So, I grasped the banister again.

And I forced it to accept me one last time.

It felt like the last fragile connection between who I had been and who I was about to be forced to become.

When my feet planted themselves on the first floor again, I took momentary solace in what I, nearly unwilling, considered a minor victory in itself. It was strange how survival could appear like a task I had not realized I had been signed up for. I knew there was not much for me here, but I walked the floor anyway.

It was all perfectly corrupted. Every room held a version of us that would be forever kept in a state of mid-breath. It felt as if the second floor could collapse on me in an instant, and I simply would not care.

In the kitchen, I found a framed photo of the three of us. Mom, Dad, and I on our last vacation.

We were happy.

We would never be happy again.

Not truly.

Not together.

The finality of it settled into my bones before I wanted to admit it.

I pressed the photo to my heart and sighed. I looked down at it again, and a few tears smacked across the glass of the frame. They smudged across Mom and Dad’s faces like a form of erasure that the world already deemed necessary. I held the photo a beat longer and toyed with the consequences of taking it. I took a picture of it with my phone and placed it back on the counter. An immutable bastion of joy now ended. The last thing that would be in this house. A small apostasy against the emptiness that now threatened to become all-consuming. I left the house for the last time and turned to stare at it from the sidewalk.

It appeared fragile.

Feeble.

I forced a smirk of ascendancy against it, but deep down, I knew it was the one who beat me. The gesture felt borrowed from someone stronger than I could have ever been. It was free to shatter as my own world had. And it could do so without an onlooker. That freedom felt nearly insulting. Then, I turned toward my car.

I wanted to look back.

Desperately.

But I felt like doing so would be an acknowledgement of what I was still avoiding.

It would have made the loss real in a way I was not ready to survive.