Joseph Has Reared Up

I hadn’t seen the keys to my room in three months. I assumed that the pockets of my winter coat that I wore in February when I left in a hurry were deep enough to fit every memory locked behind the chipboard door. When I drowned my hand in the pocket lining, the black hole burped up a cheap trinket attached to a key chain. It was waiting here patiently, buried in my inability to remember the life I’d left behind. And when I finally came to fish it out I doubted it would feel the same in the keyhole. Like an occasional meet-up with an ex-lover that you only hope would break the lock you carefully sealed around the neck of your past life — it never does.

The keyhole felt loose as ever while the key was measuredly spinning around its axis. From up close it reminded me of a minute hand that broke the laws of time, turning the days back slowly. The first thing that hit me was the smell, my roommate's perfume still lingering in the air, stale, almost hovering. I imagined that if I were to perform a dance and calculate the movements with unparalleled precision — like a shaman selflessly calls to the powers beyond theirs — the misty clouds in my room would turn into a ladder. From up there, the room would seem like a particle, unworthy of sheltering so much of what I’d thought I was.

My cold bed sheets, collecting the dust from the curtains that shake with every occasional gust of the wind. My cactus I struggled to give a silly name to that all of a sudden looked like a Joseph to me, though it used to be Joey before. My plastic gun that appeared to be a touch more real this time around. My every distraction, my every heartache, my every fall I experienced on this bed. How much of it is still in the back alleys of what I’d thought I was?

No semblance of an earthquake happened, when the square footage of the room turned around and glanced back at me. My face seemed only barely familiar to it, too. The nights my godsend spent in this old room seemed unremarkable to him. But the walls with iconically Slavic floral designs and I felt like puzzles pressed together to fit, leaving clearances in between. I tried to fill in the gaps with our fights invariably followed by his touch, and it only pushed the backlashes further apart.

This place stayed unaltered for someone I no longer am. It’s kept its innocence for another woman to come and seize it, or rather claim it righteously as her belonging. I am a marauder at a place I built from the ground up desperately searching for someone to shelter me away from the guilt of ignoring a home that reared up against me. It’s demanding to level out the mile between my heart and my head — that same one I’ve stretched out like Ariadne's thread to find my way back when the key would discover it’s destined to stay in the keyhole’s tight grip at night.