The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in your House

I am not the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your house.

There are no words exchanged, there is no mysticism, there is no wind in the twisted, contorted corridors of this vast, small, empty, breathless, sad place.

If they knew, your mother would have said, "It's in your head, darling," and your father would have screamed, "Put that head in the toilet bowl where it belongs."

Except your father never screamed and your mother never spoke.

Because it's all in your head, at the end of the day.

Even this house, with its every surface covered in your endless scribbles and its very essence bearing the impossible weight of your feather-like soul—

Don't you know by now that it's in your head, my love? Don't you know that the house is only floating in space and time, suspended by the invisible cables hooked to your head, my love?

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I am not the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your house.

Because your house doesn't exist and hasn't since the day you buried me.

The dirt flowed out of your hand without resistance that day.

You coated the slick blackness of my coffin in record time, pressuring my body into submission and pulverising my soul until it came to no longer exist.

Except it existed but it was only in your head.

Don't you remember that day, my love? When the dirt was stuck under your fingers, and the blood coloured your lovely pale face crimson, and you scrubbed and scrubbed your hands under the cold of the running water till they became raw.

Don't you remember the day when the emptiness of your home became a deafening din and changed it into a house, my love?

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No, I am not the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your house.

No matter how much you want it to be me.

And it's not your mother and it's not your high-school English teacher with her cute pumps and it's not the pretty cashier at the departmental store that you flirted with on the day you left me.

No, my love, it's none of us who haunt these desolate, depraved, ruthless, quiet, barbaric corridors.

My love, don't you know that it's the ghosts of your blank soul packed with its queue of memories of anger and jealousies and regrets that inhabit this treacherous house?

Don't you know that you are the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your own house, my love?

Don't you know?