The Space You Left Behind

Chapter1

The house that loved me

Before my life became something I had to survive, it was something soft.

My childhood was filled with noise in the best possible way. Music playing somewhere in the background. My mother yelled my name from another room because I was doing something I was not supposed to be doing. My father laughing too loudly at his own jokes while smoke from the barbecue drifted through the air every weekend.

Back then, happiness felt ordinary.

Not the kind of happiness people post online or write poems about. Just small things. Family night drives with no destination. Restaurants after long days. Falling asleep in the backseat while streetlights moved across the windows like slow moving stars.

I think those were the moments that built me before life started undoing parts of me.

I was an extremely strange child.

The kind of child that either made people laugh or completely exhausted them.

I ate ants once because I genuinely believed I was a vampire. I also used to poop in the shower because I hated sitting on the toilet while my body was still wet. Looking back now, I know that sounds disgusting, but children live inside tiny worlds of logic that only make sense to them.

I drove my family insane constantly.

One time my mother got so tired of me running around the house screaming and bothering everybody that she locked me in my room. Most children probably would have cried dramatically or accepted defeat.

Not me.

I climbed onto my bed and started banging on the window like I had been imprisoned for twenty years. Eventually she let me out, but honestly, freedom only made me worse.

Another time I got angry and punched a window hard enough to crack it. Then I casually walked away pretending I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I think I lasted maybe ten minutes before guilt started eating me alive and I admitted it was me.

That was always the thing about me.

No matter how chaotic I was, guilt eventually found me.

Sometimes I would lie inside holes my dogs had dug in the sand because the ground felt cool against my skin. Sometimes my dogs would lie there beside me while I stared up at the sky for no reason at all. I loved animals deeply, especially dogs. There was something comforting about the way they loved without asking questions first.

Back then, life itself felt gentle.

Every weekend my family had barbecues. We still do sometimes, but not like before. Back then it felt like those weekends would last forever. Smoke in the air. Adults talking over each other. Plates clinking together. Music echoing through the house while my father stood near the grill acting like some professional chef.

Those memories stay with me the most.

Not the important days.
Not birthdays.
Not holidays.

Just ordinary evenings where everybody I loved happened to exist in the same place at the same time.

I have a younger sister. We were never very close as children, and honestly, I still do not completely understand why. It was never hatred or jealousy. We simply moved around each other instead of toward each other. But now we are close, and sometimes I grieve the relationship we could have had earlier in life.

Both of my parents were always present. That matters more to me now than it did when I was younger. At the time, I thought everybody grew up that way. I thought everybody had a father who would fix things just because they looked broken.