For Sale

draft in progress

“Hello,” I whisper to the walls, cupping my knees to my chest with a small sense of embarrassment that I am speaking to an empty house.

I am sitting in the middle of a room of the house that I no longer live in, here because I catch a flight tomorrow morning to visit my brother in Boston, and I needed a place to stay overnight. For $1,400 a month in mortgage payments until it sells, I get to visit Savannah and sleep on the last piece of furniture we have in the house – a piece left intentionally so that my husband and I can return to it anytime we like, and so that I can occasionally spend the night. It is like a very sophisticated type of camping.

I stare up at the old ceiling, gently rocking, seated Indian-style, and ignoring the discomfort of my backside bones jutting into the unforgiving wood floor of the room where I napped for survival, and where we conceived our daughter, then the room where I later nursed her, crying out in howls from the pain of her suckling. A room with soft colors, magnolia flowers in a frozen dance, framed on the wall, soft lamp-light singing a warm hum; the room where we spewed sickness and laughter; questioned movies with complicated plot-lines from our queen-size bed. The room I fought most of my depression, which lived there for four years with us, and too, lives with me now in our new home.

So strange to be here now, to walk the floors of this house we prayed to buy, and now pray to sell.

I hear the city sounds outside, the jagged harmonies of living I have left behind, traded off for another life where the squeals of villainous car stereos have been replaced by songs of pixie birds who build nests in unexpected places.

Ghosts always inhabit the homes we used to love. I sit here now, hearing Anna’s phantom cries releasing from her small blue room to the right, like a sound effect for a stage play, and the scene has ended, and all has gone dark.