Comeback

In answer to your question, there are three things that I now need you to know.

Firstly, all places have an expiry date.  Not that I think it’s written anywhere, like a supermarket best before you understand, but every place has it all the same.  And I’m not talking about cracks and gaps; no romantic images of crumbling castles here.  In fact, I think most places expire long before the bricks sink back into the soil.  No, this truth is far harder to grasp.  Well, it was for me.  It has taken the best part of twenty years and even now I feel that it slips through my fingers most days.  Every place expires, I tell myself, but it is not always that easy to believe it when the bricks and mortar are still there.  I mean, the place where you and I once lived no longer really exists, even though I could still go there.  If I wanted to.

Secondly, just so we’re absolutely clear, places are not built; they are made.  I think.  Overall, this has been a big help in understanding what happened and why our house is no longer accessible.  Most days.  Although, I suppose you’re wondering what that means.  Not that I’m sure you deserve an explanation.  But here goes anyway…  I guess, for me, places and people are the same.  Or that is how I see it.  Not all places of course.  Parks, for example, are just places.  However animated they may get - even by the ravings of a grown adult losing their shit in the playground – this is only temporary, as they become dormant again when everyone leaves.  Houses, on the other hand; houses have life.  They have a smell and a taste.  They ooze something that is real; that is alive.   

Like people.  

Like you.  

I often used to wander around our house, looking for traces of myself.  Looking for some sort of evidence that I existed there.  This was back in the days of indecision when I was only really just beginning to understand it all.  But even then, I knew your footprint was bigger than mine.  On everything, I think.  Your voice louder; your hand heavier.  You were everywhere in that house.  Like your aura drizzled down every wall, stuck to the floors like glue.  Coated everything in your opinion like cling-film.

But I digress… I find I do that a lot these days.  It’s all part of the shift… our shift.  My shift, I believe.

What I want to tell you is that home, of course, is the most alive building.  Every other place is less alive for everyone, in varying degrees.  It’s hard to explain this but I think it’s mostly to do with smell.  Unfamiliar buildings have alien odours; familiar places, are more evocative in the smell department.  Until you get to your own house, which is odourless.  Although only to you, because you’re immune to it. But I think as soon as you are able to smell your own home, that’s when the countdown to expiry begins.  When you lose immunity because the smells bring back memories and the memories suggest a past that you are now separate from.

The first time I smelt our home was the day it occurred to me that you were essentially wrong.  Or this is what I tell myself anyway.  And some days it still sounds like the truest thing I’ve ever said.  On other days, I hear your voice insisting that I’ve made it up.  And on these days, I enter the wormhole, which mostly involves your voice on repeat and everything else in darkness.  These days are hard but they are becoming fewer and further between.  Last month I only had one, and it wasn’t so bad, really.  The easiest ones are now shiftable if I can just imagine screwing them up like a piece of paper and throwing them over my shoulder.  The worst ones are the ones with the endless questions; the ones where I feel that I’ve never understood anything in my entire life.  And I find myself in a place that should have expired decades ago but still insists on coming back to life.  

I often wonder if you ever have these moments.  I can’t imagine that you would.  Self-doubt was never really your thing.

****

Lastly, I need you to understand that people also expire.  I imagine that this will come as a bit of a shock to you.  You who found death such an unfathomable concept.  I used to think that you were afraid of it, back in the confusion days when I still hoped that I might help.  It took me a while to realise that it wasn’t fear at all, but blind fury that anyone might dare to take control from you.  That you might, in fact, be really quite insignificant in the grand scheme of things.  And guess what?  So you are, my darling.  You are insignificant, because you no longer exist.  You expired long ago now.  At least, as the person I once knew.  And as the person you became.  

And so have I.  Mostly.  Although this has been a much longer process.  Sometimes I wonder how big the hole I left might have been for you.  Not big I’m guessing.  A lump in the bed that irritated you by breathing.  The odd knick-knack that would need boxing.  Maybe a lingering smell of perfume in the wardrobe.    All dealable stuff that would barely scratch your surface.  Intermittent stabs at the heart?  Maybe.  Or maybe just rage at the indignity of loss.  That I actually dared to leave you.

For me, it has been more like an exorcism.  An extrication of your voice in my head; of living my life through the filter of your rules.  They’ve all needed a long and painful amputation.  A transplant-like readjustment to allow me to exist without your approval.  And yet, at night, when I cannot sleep, sometimes I do return to you.  To our home.  Like a torturous reminder of who I was.  Or maybe the benchmark of how far I’ve come.  I am not there yet.  But now in the mornings, I feel myself growing once more into my limbs; occupying the space between the sheets; filling my lungs with a new voice.  And I smell… nothing.  Just odourless unapologetic familiarity.

****

And so, when you saw me in the park today and demanded that I come home, you may have thought that I hadn’t heard you as I walked away.  I did.  Repeatedly.  And, in answer to your question – the one you screamed at me across the crowded grass - there will be no returning home for me, because our home expired the day you started wrapping it around me like a cage.  The day you squeezed the bars so tightly that I could no longer breathe.