What Came Through the Walls

I thought I had sealed it properly,

laid each brick with steady hands,

stacked them high enough

to block the weather out.

No mortar,

but I told myself it would hold.

I told myself

balance could be enough

if I was careful.

Years passed

with sunlight in the doorway,

with laughter that felt real in my chest,

with a body I dragged back from the edge

and taught to stand again.

I lived inside that house

like it was safe.

Until the first crack

not loud, not violent,

just a shift

in the quiet.

A conversation

that wasn’t mine

but slipped under the door anyway,

carrying something familiar

in its breath.

I didn’t recognise it at first.

Not fully.

Just a tightening,

low and instinctive,

like my body knew before I did.

Then it came back

not as memory,

not clean,

not something I could hold up

and name.

It came as fragments,

edges,

flashes that didn’t ask permission.

A feeling before a picture.

A knowing before a word.

And the walls

they didn’t fall all at once.

They gave way slowly,

brick by brick,

each one loosening

as if something inside them

had been waiting

to be seen again.

I tried to hold them.

Pressed my palms against the cracks,

told myself

this wasn’t real,

that I had already survived

everything there was to survive.

But this

this was new

and old at the same time.

Something my mind

had buried so deep

it forgot the shape of it

until now.

Until it returned

wearing the past

like it had never left.

And suddenly

I was standing in that house again,

but the roof was gone,

the walls split open,

everything exposed

to a sky that felt too wide

to be safe under.

I could see it then

not clearly,

not all at once,

but enough

to know

this had always been there,

quiet beneath the floorboards,

waiting for the weight of my life

to shift just enough

for it to rise.

The worst part

is not that it came back.

It’s how familiar it feels

now that it’s here.

Like something in me

recognises it,

even as I stand there

trying to understand

how I ever lived

without knowing

this was part of the house

all along.