Really alone

I still have nightmares about this place and its unfinished projects. Its unattended responsibilities.

When I return to the house on Ranchitos Road, it’s always night and the lamps don’t quite reach into the shadowy corners. I assess what’s left out of half-packed boxes. Fish tanks with the water mostly evaporated contain a few feisty fish left to pick at the rotting flesh of their tank mates. Maybe there’s a dog in the yard, chained to the ground and shaking with excitement to see me. Sometimes, her paw is severed. Sometimes, she’s just dusty and hungry. I hug her, and I promise to come back for her, but for an unknown reason, I can’t take her now. I can’t fix the problems. I can’t pack the boxes, or clean out the trash, or open the fish tank lid. I know I can’t keep my promise to save her, and I feel guilty.

I have a sense that I have come from very far to deal with the refuse of my family’s life- the neglected things left behind when our normal collapsed- and that I don’t know where to start. I don’t have the tools. I don’t have the time. There’s not a soul in the world to help me figure it out or lift the boxes. It’s more dark than light. I can’t see clearly.

Sometimes, I can hear a TV in the other room.

Always, I get the sense that someone is watching me.

It feels like the ghosts have won. They’ve run us off and taken over the house, and I am now an invader surrounded by my dead family’s things. Things that were mine long ago when I was a different person, with a different life, a family life. Things that were important to me as a child are strewn across the house, along with my mom’s ceramic bowls, dad’s tools, my brother’s piles of paper and string, our laundry from when I was a different size- interested in different fashion.

For some reason, the lights are still on, but they can’t reach all the way into the shadows. That’s where they wait and watch me. Or maybe, they’re outside the open back door where it’s pitch black. I don’t know who they are, but I can feel their presence the same way I did when I was a kid living in this house.

Something moves the leaves- maybe it’s the dog’s chain. I feel sick that she’s out there alone. All the time, alone and hungry and there’s not a thing I can do about it. I don’t have the power to fix this neglected place, even as an adult. We abandoned it when I was too young to make it right, too inexperienced. Underequipped for tying the loose ends.

Defiantly alit, it still feels like it should be ours. I know it’s now a home for ghosts and the half-packed boxes of everything we promised to get back to someday. Who is paying for the lights in this house of unresolved things that I can’t fix? I can’t make it right because it only exists in my memory now.

I can’t tie up the loose ends, yet they need to be tied. Their need becomes my need. It stifles me and chokes me. I sense that I have been sent to resolve what’s left undone. I have a grownup body with the capacity of a child. I pretend that everything is under control- my control. The loose ends, with their instinct to wrap, tie themselves around my neck.

I awake in my adult house, well-cared for. Everything is maintained. Over-maintained in retaliation against my neglectful youth. Every piece of laundry is folded. Every dish is clean and dry. The sink is wiped. The roof is new. The light reaches every corner.

And I have a sense that something has followed me back from the dream. It’s watching me sweat in my carefully made bed. It knows where I came from and about the mess we left behind there.

I turn on the lamps, and I cry because I still can’t make it right. There’s a 40-year-old little girl in me, and she’s still afraid of the dark. I think I hear the jingle of a dog tag, the drag of a rope across the floor. It can’t be. I am really alone.

Am I really alone?