I have this close friend who also writes on a blog, and I realized recently that we both haven’t written (wrote?) consistently in a while so I told him to come up with a topic for me to write about and I’d do the same for him, in hopes of keeping each other accountable. This was approximately 3 weeks ago and I’m just now posting this, so I suppose it somewhat worked. Anyways, the topic he gave me was “detachment.” I wrote a poem on my parent’s house.

my parents’ house
Someone asked me recently if I was going home for the summer. And I corrected them. “You mean my parents’ house? In Pennsylvania?”

I don’t know why I did that. Yes, I do.

There’s a bed in the second room upstairs that I picked out when I was ten, decorated with stuffed animals I still cannot sleep without.
Yet I call it my parents’ house.

The basement is filled with my easels and my canvases and almost every drawer is full of art supplies I’ve collected over the years.
Yet I call it my parents‘ house.

In the backyard there’s a singular, super tall sunflower that I planted junior year of high school, back when that was my favorite flower.
Yet I call it my parents‘ house.

Not because it isn’t home. Because it is. And I know now that I’ll likely never go back permanently. Calling it home makes me sob every time the thought crosses my mind. So I gave it away in language in an effort to detach. Feels evil and cold, but I am always so far from home. It’s easier if it isn’t mine. It’s easier if I already left.

My parents‘ house. My parents’ house! My parents’ house.

Hopefully I’ll say it enough that I’ll start to believe it.