Three Floor Townhouse, For Sale Now!

by Luka Neal

Three Floor Townhouse, For Sale Now!

This house is 2400 square feet with three floors. In total, it includes three bedrooms, four bathrooms, a dining room, a living room, and the faint silhouettes of memories engraved in its walls. Starting price is much more than you’ll ever find in your piggy bank.

 

I live in a lanky townhouse. One of faded orange and exhausted windows. One of creased, bumpy walls who are attempting to withstand the weight around them. One of old memories and new posters. It’s like a skeleton,with flesh struggling to hold on to its gnarled, creaky joints. Every day it  weeps in pain, aging too quickly for its steel entrails to keep up. They twist and conform as the paint licking its interior subsides.

I’ve shared all my days with the same house, there isn’t a time I can remember when I wasn’t engulfed in its comfortable arms. It’s like a cocoon nursing me through the years, embracing the growing caterpillar I am. Maybe I never end up metamorphosing, I suppose we’ll see.

I picture my father cursing, livid at the fact that the dishwasher’s puttered to a stop, or the dryer isn’t humming the way it usually does. He always says there’s a countless list of things to fix, yet deep down I know he loves the crumbled bones of this place as much as I do. My mother is the same, disappointed sighs creeping out from between her lips as the water pipes clang, or as she notices a new scrape on the wall, but what she doesn’t know is that I also notice every time her eyes crease with a toothy smile when she organizes parties with family friends, everyone drunkenly laughing in our faded blue living room as my sister snoozes the hours away on her favorite gray couch.

The walls held my hands as storms washed away my sense of security, winced as I peeled away paint chips from their flesh, and cried as the sting of new coatings healed their old wounds.

I sleep in a small room, maybe seven by fifteen feet. Throughout the years it’s evolved, contorted as I stuff more dressers in, or get a more spatially efficient bed, or plaster the walls with new posters, but in a way it’ll always be the same. The same shade of blue I chose as a five year-old and the one room I shared with my sister was split in two, the same scribbly papers out front, sloppily taped on the front door covered with words I didn’t understand when I made them like “caution!” and “dangerous!”

I thought they looked cool at the time. Part of me still does, even if all of the words are misspelled.

I run home when I’m scared, curl up in its maw. It kisses me goodnight every day, closing its watering eyes as its walls become infested with a stale alcohol aroma. Home is sweet, sour, overwhelming and calming, with the loudest scream and the smoothest purr.