In the town where silence reigned,
there stood a tan, single story house of shadows.
Its yard was strewn with refuse, its face degraded,
and I, a child pressed into service, tried to sweep decay away.
Its windows were covered with hellscreen, grim panes that never welcomed,
its doors sighed beneath the weight of secrets unsaid.
Within those walls I learned that conflict was exile,
that love was only another word for betrayal.
The chambers whispered with cruelties:
a stepmother, sometimes softened by her medicines, yet still neglectful, still striking;
a father whose voice and hands bore equal violence,
teaching that even home was sharpened steel.
I lay first in a storage closet, where dreams collapsed in dust,
then in a locked room whose bolt clanged shut each night,
sealing me into dread.
The house grew monstrous in my mind.
Corridors stretched like endless tunnels, doors threatened at every threshold.
It became a prison, its grip closing tighter with every year.
I wandered thereafter from foster beds to hospital wards,
carrying fragments of myself like broken glass.
Trust withered, faith decayed into echo,
and I clothed myself in masks so none might glimpse the fractures beneath.
Yet still the house did not wholly devour me.
I carved my skin with blades to remind myself I was alive,
then traded blood for ink, tattoos etched as runes of survival,
a semicolon marked with the tally of forty two failures at ending,
forty two continuations against my will.
At night I returned in dreams: the walls folding like a closing fist,
wallpaper sagging with old breath, curtains frayed like funeral veils.
The house bent over me, whispering lullabies of bleach and ash.
Hands without mercy traced the hollows of my ribs,
a grotesque tenderness that crushed as it consoled.
Shadows lay upon me like guilty lovers, their heat both cruel and sweet.
The lock turned, the bolt slid home,
I learned to measure hours by the shape of terror.
Despair courted me with twin faces:
the gentle voice that lured toward oblivion,
and the harsher hand that made oblivion near.
The taste of that house clung to me, as roses laced with poison cling to the tongue,
beautiful, slow, and deadly.
And now I stand beyond its doorway, though never free of its dominion.
The world beyond is pale and treacherous,
yet the lesson carved deepest remains:
that even in darkness, when shadows whisper like forbidden lovers,
when memory burns like a kiss both feared and longed for,
I endure, until endurance itself collapses,
and the House of Shadows, my only true inheritance,
closes not only its doors, but its grave, upon me forever.