The house is quiet and quaint, let's not ruin it. I stare at the wall across the room from my bed, tugging at my blankets. My eyes burrow through ground and dig a hole. I crawl down the hole and dig deeper, deeper. Five of us sit around the table and laugh. Mashed potatoes. Always mashed potatoes. We all pose for a camera, my mother holding my toddling sister. My eight year old mouth grins a bigger smile than I've known for years. Christmas cards whisk by me like a flip book. I pause at the last page and wonder why four seems so much less than five. I’ve dug my way back through the ground out the other side. I poke my head out the hole. I’m back in bed, trying to get to sleep.
I wake up to an old sofa. The living room fills with water and I sail away on my sofa to a far away place. Far away from anything that could remind me. Far away from this house called home, drowned with artifacts and anecdotes. The sofa where I watched football with Dad on Sundays, the stain on the carpet where I spilled his beer, the empty recliner in the living room he read the paper every morning, the cracks in the ceiling from the water damage he never got around to repairing. But none of it tears at me like the fake smile on my mother's face. Or the way she calls for me to eat and tears me away from my sofa on the empty, open sea. I dive in the water and swim to the kitchen.
I sit in the car and tug at the wheel. I turn up the radio to blast any thoughts from my head. I watch the music soar to the heavens and follow it. My body snakes out of the car window and flees to the sky. Everything is clearer when I sit atop the clouds. I see all the landmarks of my youth: the old school, the church, the baseball field, the DMV. He drove me to all of them when I was still sitting in the passenger seat. We rear end the car in front of me. I fall back into the driver's seat and the soft loving grasp of the airbag.
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