The Dream House

            Banished from my thoughts, pulled from my fingers, every time I said your name I spit it out like acid. I washed you down the drain and cried you from my eyes until a blood vessel burst. But still you clawed your way into my dreams. You wrapped your hand around my waist and wove your way back into my hair.

            So I took you to the house I always stayed in. When we got there, the top floor had rotted through and a hole bled into the living room below. The boards felt paper thin, and yet still they held my weight. You told me about the pain that comes from abandonment, how devastated you were, and I wasn’t impressed. I laughed and asked why you thought I wouldn’t know.

            Then your words tumbled out onto the dust-ridden floor. You’d been here, you’d seen it, and you’d let people stay. Some men you barely knew had slept in my bed, had broken a window, and had left the next morning. And I caught the scent of them on the air. They still lingered, and I hated them. I looked at the set of your concerned brow, and I wanted to break you, to scratch your face, to push you and watch you fall.

            But instead I said, “Don’t ever do that again.” I left the house and felt it crumble in the back of my brain. My safe space was ended, another casualty in the world I let you infect. Nowhere to lie down and sleep, nowhere to cook breakfast and watch the sun rise would be waiting for me anymore. And the last semblance of you was gone.

            And then I woke up.