Home Coming

The dead branches of the giant climbing Ivy still remained attached of the fence that bordered the place I once called home. It looked like a tragedy had happened here that left the place abandoned and haunted but perhaps that’s the best way to describe the events that had occurred here.

I stood at the gates and looked at the overgrown grass leading to the front entrance of the house and it was hard to reconcile this lifeless building to the once green and happy house it had been.

Everything had to started to change so gradually it was hard to pinpoint the exact moment our family got destroyed. I just know that at some point mother had started spending more time in her bedroom and father had started staying out late, coming home when we were asleep and leaving before we woke up. I had tried to get mother to play games with me like she did before but I couldn’t get any response from her. Occasionally, she would snap at me to leave her alone and that’s the only response I’d get from her.

So I created my own schedule too, to keep myself busy like my brother did with his football games and his insatiable desire to be cool and get the girls in school. For me, my savior was books, I read and read and read. I finished all the books on fathers bookshelf including the ones I wasn’t allowed to read because I was underage.

My mothers condition got worse and I got sent to boarding school. I got to make friends and I dreaded leaving them when school closed to go home to a place that felt strange despite being familiar. I knew what it was that ailed my mother, I’d learned about it in school. It was a disease of the mind. Her brain didn’t work like other peoples did, it refused to produce the chemicals that make us feel happy, she was constantly in a state of doom and nothing mattered.

I had tried to discuss it with father but he brushed me off, he was too important to have a mentally ill wife. He would never let the world know that his wife was clinically depressed and so one morning when I tiptoed into mothers bedroom and found her unconscious with an empty bottle of her pain medications, I knew she had taken her own life to end the pain. Ofcourse father covered it up, she had died in her sleep afterall.

And so today, many years later as I return here, to a place I should have called home, I’m filled with emptiness. It tugs at my insides and I wonder if perhaps I will suffer the same fate as my mother. I’m alone in this world afterall, with no place or person to call home.