Home Is Where

They say make home a place, but four walls and a roof have never been comforting. They instead are the confinements of my life, where my Imagination wears stripes and clanks a metal mug against the iron bars. Clink, clink, clink. Every step is three clinks. I've paced this hallway long enough to know that exactly four strides are needed to reach one end from the other. If the tan carpet with the blood red designs, bought from one of my mothers trips to antique stores, shifts slightly, then you may have to add another one in, in order to shift it back to its rightful place. If the heater is on and the grind of the gears from the radiator in the wall scares you the way it did me, then you can jump over that two-foot radius of space in front of the warmest part of the house, that will take the steps down to only two and a half. There are no light fixtures in this part of the house, only the natural light created from the surrounding three bedrooms, but when night falls or doors slam, it's Alaska, far and foreign, not even a heater can warm this tilted axis of bricks and paint. The loud hallway of metal coffee cup clanks harbors the space where I fell onto my knees and begged a faceless body to stay, perhaps every connection of metal on metal was a beat of my heart. The place where I fell onto my knees and looked up at the cross nailed to my door, perhaps every clash was loss in my heart. The waste of wall where pictures could but do not hang, perhaps every clinking is a nail falling from an age of disuse. So how could this be home? A place where haunted echos of hell, of the past, whisper in my ears. My bed lies inches from the dark space, and at night when I lay my head on the pillow, I'm for certain that the prisoners, in their shackles and chains, come rest their heads beside mine. Nighttime- a moments rest in the music made of a mug. Nighttime- recess for the prisoners, the courtyard is my mind. Sometimes Imagination reads me bedtime stories, stroking my cheek with a warm hand, each one about a time of where no one stalked the hall during the day. Have you ever willingly stepped off of an airplane, not to die but to feel weightlessness, to let the shackles of your backpack, drop to the earth below? Have you ever dipped into the ocean without fear of the water or creatures, not to drown but to let the coolness wash through every pore, to reach the innermost parts and cleanse? Have you ever let yourself freely love, not with the anticipation of being loved in return but just to allow your weary heart a moment of grace? Yeah, neither have I, but the escapee on my bed has painted these each on my blank canvas eyelids, and each so inviting that I nearly my claw my way into the color stained flesh, to see nothing more than what is good. Other times, Imagination lays beside me and hisses about the horror stories in my life, a cool hand now clasps my arm shaking me violently with a mixture of gurgling screams and giggles escaping his lips. Have you ever died a thousand times, only you don't die after living, you die because you lived? Have you ever torn your throat out to stop the screams elicited from the crouching shadow who stares at you from atop your wardrobe, but you aren't screaming out of fear, no this is a game to both of you, both wondering who can be the louder, have you? Have you ever fallen through your bed, through the floor, through the cellar stone floor, through the dirt, through the core of the earth, back out through the other side only to wave at the poor fish as you fall up, through space, through blackness , through nothing and just kept falling? Yeah, neither have I, perhaps I should have listened to my mother when she told me not to watch those movies right before bed. So how could this be home? What. with the clinking and rattling.