[We Don’t Live Here Anymore]
Tonight the ceiling drips metaphors. But I’ve started writing back.
We’re four rusted gears in a machine that feeds on its own friction.
A father, a mother, two children — not quite enemies, not quite allies — just variables in an endless equation of hurt.
Sometimes it’s A hurting B, then B hurting C.
But most nights, it’s all of us rerouting pain like old electricity, flickering through exposed wires.
No one hits anymore — not visibly — not with hands. But silence slaps. Indifference cuts. Anger slices. Love? It watches.
And the worst part? We’ve all learned the choreography.
It’s in the way Ma pours tea like a truce.
In the way Baba pretends the TV is louder than our silences.
In how my sibling and I pass sarcasm like heirlooms — delicate, sharpened.
We orbit each other like broken, wounded moons — bound by all scar tissue, guilt and gravity, pretending this is what families do. Collapsing.
Every meal is a ritual in denial — spoons clink like nervous ticks, and no one mentions what happened yesterday, or ten years ago.
Some nights, I think we take turns being the villain — not because we want to, but because the story demands it.
Love, in this house, is inherited like an old cough — familiar, unhealed, echoing down generations.
If A blames B, and B blames C, and C blames D, and D blames A — does the circle break, or just become tighter?
Each room could represent a different phase of pain.
The kitchen is where forgiveness is faked.
Monsoon here smells like old arguments — humid, unresolved.
The bedroom — secrets — the breath held between confessions — where whispers curdle into silence — where touch remembers what the mouth forgets — where silence nests in the folds of bedsheets — where nightmares wear familiar voices — where the past slips under the pillow, still warm — the only room where truth dares to undress — and still hides — inherited and unspoken — tucked in like lullabies no one dares to finish.
The hallway — avoidance — the stretch of silence between fights — where eyes glance but never meet — where footsteps mean more than words — where voices trail off before they reach the door — where anger cools but never disappears — where guilt passes guilt in passing — where apologies are rehearsed but never spoken — the path between rooms, but never resolution — a liminal space, always waiting — the place where we forget, then remember, then pretend again.
Even the light switches know which wounds to avoid. We don’t live here anymore — we haunt.
I remember once — Ma laughing so hard at a movie she snorted tea through her nose.
Baba didn’t laugh, but he smiled like it was a secret he hoped no one would notice.
That moment lives somewhere under all this static. I think.
I wonder if one day I’ll pour tea like a truce too.
If my children will flinch at the sound of spoons.
If trauma is something we pass down with the furniture.
Some arguments from 2007 still echo through these walls. But so do I.
The ghosts here don’t wear sheets — they wear old t-shirts and smell like guilt and shampoo.
I can't tell if I'm 12 again or just stuck.
Maybe one day I’ll write about healing.
Today, I needed to remember the architecture of hurt.
I didn’t write this for closure.
I wrote it because the house won’t stop echoing.
I write this not to exorcise it, but to remember which ghosts are mine.
Or.
There is no moral. Only memory.
- Oizys.
P.S. - This one wrote itself like a bruise forming beneath the skin. It’s not a story. It’s a map of echoes, grief, and the things we inherit even when we don’t want to. Some houses hold furniture. Others hold echoes. This one holds both.
