Part 166: The Lonliest House In the World

He says he has flashbacks.  About them.  Dying and stuff.  And as cold as it sounds to my own ears, I think I'm finally past that.  I mean, don't get me wrong, I still visualize car wrecks...a lot.  But the bloody details are gone.  For me, it's now more like a diagram on a black board before a ball game.  I see a log truck or a gravel hauler or maybe a guy with a rickety wheel...my mind plays out the final destination-esque scenario and when it doesn't happen, the sadistic coach inside my head wipes the board and starts again.  

For me, it's the house.  The house that was our home - "our" being all-inclusive meaning them, as well.  The house we stayed in way too long after the dream was over.  The house that became hell.  

I see it all so clear.  We had our hoarded little niche in the 12 x 12 living room.  Perpendicular couches that once seated our joyous family became our beds, and night turned into day and day into night and we would just think and think and think, two lonely prisoners secluded from each other and the world by the walls of our own mind.  With the doors blocked off by heavy blankets and the windows blacked out with aluminum foil, the only source of light was artificial, and the darkness was all-consuming.  

We had a kitchen.  A very bright, dirty kitchen that I never felt motivated to clean.  The last time I cleaned it, Shane was there.  Keeping me company.  Letting me vent about people dying and keeping my cool.  And we laughed together.  And he was real.  And he was there.  But that was centuries ago and now the dishes are piled high (I rinse them when we need them).  You have to go outside to burn the trash so I let it pile up until I can't stand it, my threshold constantly expanding.  We haven't had hot water in years and the only heat (or air in the summer) is in our room...the living room that we exist in.  There is a never ending cycle of laundry, floor to washer to dryer to top of dryer and if it falls I guess maybe I'll cycle it again if I ever happen to miss it.

There's a bathroom in the hallway, and three doors that each lead to another level of the purgatory we created.  Door one was the band room that used to have music.  Now there's a rug with the fading indention of a drum set that I helped Shane's mom dismantle after the accident.  Door two was the bedroom we started.  The one that Shane and Jess helped us paint.  It was going to be our room, our stuff still piled here and there, a painted closet door leaning against a wall, everything still exactly where we left it.  No bed, no dresser.  Just the beginning odds and ends thrown haphazardly into corners or boxes, a tv in the floor with an active DVR, neither of which would ever be used.  

Door three was at the end of the hall.  The room with the most memories.  Their moms had emptied their room while we were out one day.  We came home and their things were gone much in the same way they were, ripped away from us without so much as a goodbye.  There was a half-drink coke on the windowsill that turned yellow by the time we moved...

The house. 

The house that used to have two red cars in the driveway and then only had one.  

The house where even the puppies couldn't stay alive.  Where everything seemed to die.  

I drive past it every now and then, three years after we finally left a year too late.  For me, it was even worse than the ever-changing horror house of Stephen King's   "Rose Red."  I would have given anything for that house to change.  But instead that house changed me.