At times I feel as though I’m wandering through the vacant halls of a house I deny is haunted. I meander down corridors as if everything is fine, everything is normal. The paintings on the walls depicting moments in my life are just paintings and none of the eyes follow me where I go. The gaslights all work fine, no weird flickering casting ominous shadows in corners not collecting cobwebs or black widow eggs. The floorboards only creak when and where I step. And the doors open and close with the twist of a knob by my hand alone.
I am safe and everything is fine.
until I turn a corner and trip over the edge of a rug. and as my body tilts with the force of my fall, the warm ambers shift into greys and ghoulish greens the paintings come to life reenacting every painful, awful, sorrowful moment the voices echo off the walls like the inner critic in my head has materialized the lights flicker off and I’m alone in a world of ghosts and demons feeling punctured by a hole that exists inside everything, hungering for more of me, dissolving the stability I feigned to think I’d earned over the years.
It’s in the falling that I cannot deny the house is haunted and that I and the house are one and the same.