Til Death Do Us Part

chapter one ~ let me go home

My eyes scanned the outside of our old home one more time.

It hurt - like hell it hurt, knowing that I would have to let it go. I would have to act like it wasn't my childhood wrapped up into one small, but personal and cozy building.

Every day I would look at it and take it for granted, see nothing but a red-brick building that I slept and ate in. But leaving it behind?
I could practically see the childhood memories, the conversations, the familiarity seeping through the cracks, ready to burst through the windows, trying to get out with us.

Because now, when I pushed open the white front door, it didn't seem a little harder to push with the force of the 'Home Sweet Home' doormat that had been there since as long as I could remember.
Now, when I took a step into the entryway, my foot made a hollow sound that seemed to echo from every surface in the house, and yet all that time ago when I was sneaking back in after a house party, drunk as a skunk, it had served me well, like a partner in crime.

The lack of curtains around the windows made the far walls of each room visible, which were missing their colourful coats, the posters and the photo frames.

No more plant pots covered the mantlepieces, no more ornaments propped on the ledges, waiting for the delicate feather duster to be brushed across them every second day by my mother, and no more people trudged through the house.

It was hollow. As hollow as I felt.
If my heart was anything, it was this house. Because this was a house now, not a home. Dad had smacked paint over the doorframe where my mom had engraved mine and Jess's heights over the years. As if those memories could be covered in a coat of paint, unretrievable, and insignificant.

Of course it hurt. And the next family who would move in here would just have done the same.
But my fingers traced the bumps where the paint was thinner over the pencil lines, and I could practically feel each memory as if it were happening again.

I couldn't feel the life in the house anymore. But then again, I stopped feeling it the day Jess was killed, even though she didn't even live with us anymore.
I stopped feeling it the night my mother finally lost the plot and turned on me.

My dad was all I had left. He forgave me for what I had done wrong, although said what happened to Jess wasn't my fault. But he never denied the same about my mother.
Except that was an unspoken understanding.

At least I still had one parent, one who loved me and didn't hold me accountable for Jess's death.

I heard the horn of my dad's sedan honk behind me, and I quickly turned away from the front door and made my way down the wooden porch steps, brushing my hand along the ageing wooden pillars and handrails as I made my way down the path, past the blank patches of dead grass where pots used to sit.

As soon as I was in the passenger seat, he turned and gave me a sad smile.
"Ready to go kiddo?"

I nodded back, not speaking, for fear that I might crack and start to cry. I had cried enough about leaving this place, and I didn't want to have to shed more tears for it.

As we reversed off the drive, I looked up again at the oak tree between our old house and the neighbours, in the small space between then, where an old tyre hung on a rope.

Just before he steered right and pulled out onto the road, I saw two young girls, one with long brown hair stood beside the rope swing, a flowery summer dress flowing in the soft wind, and a smaller girl gripping the tyre for dear life, her eyes wide with a combination of excitement and fear, her own dress splattered with mud, but her golden locks billowing upwards, melting into the early morning sun.