The House Knows

The house knows me less than I know it— doorframes have shrunk, the garden's gone wild, light falls through windows at angles I don't remember, and I stand in the kitchen where my mother's hands moved through a thousand mornings I can only imagine now.

Everything is smaller. The stairs creak in new places. The tree we climbed has split down one side, still growing, still alive, but wounded by winters I spent far from here, building other rooms, other thresholds, other lives.

I touch the wall where we marked our heights. The pencil marks have faded almost to nothing— a palimpsest of becoming, each line a year when we believed we were moving forward into clarity, into ourselves.

But returning is different. Returning unmakes us. The girl who lived here couldn't fit in these rooms anymore even if she wanted to. She's distributed now— across decades, across cities, across all the people who knew her when, who knew her before.