the smell of a burned home

i carry his anger and her ruthlessness. it tore them apart just as they tore me apart. it still tears me at the seams, but my heart is the only place left where they are still together, where everything seems fine and makes sense in a way, with flowers and sunshine.

but there is a scent of burning in this house. not the soft smoke of a blown-out candle or the warmth of a kitchen. it’s the kind of acrid stench that cuts itself into your skin and clings to the back of your throat. the kind of smoke that hurts. this is the smell of a house on fire: the doing of two people who were supposed to teach me what love means and how it feels to be loved but at the end only taught me how to burn myself.

the wallpaper is peeling like blistered skin, revealing the charcoal layers of years spent screaming in silence. i stand in the hallway, looking at happy pictures, a perfect, tragic hybrid of their worst parts. i have his clenched fists; i have her cold eyes.

i used to wonder why they stayed together for so long; it wasn't for me - but now i see it, they didn't just share a home; they shared a fever. they built something out of loneliness and waited for a spark. and i was that spark - for a short period of time, way too short.

every step i take through these rooms feels like walking on something that shattered. i shouldn't be here. this house doesn't want to be saved and neither do i. we are a slowmotion catastrophe, a portrait painted in soot. if you stay too long, you’ll start to smell like it too - like the bitter smoke of a love that was never meant to survive the night.

i watch the curtains sway, heavy with the weight of a layer of grey and black. they look like funeral veils. maybe mine, when they buried me in the ashes of their non-expanded love. her silence was always a storm brewing; his words were the lightning that struck. now, i am the thunder that follows. i can feel their shadows wrestling under my skin, fighting for control of my hands, my breath, my thoughts, my way of acting and my future.

you asked me why i didn't leave. but how do you leave a house that you carry inside your chest, with the hope of feeling loved at one point?

i reached out and touched the wall. the heat isn't behind the wallpapers; it’s coming from my fingertips. they didn't just break me; they forged me in an oven of resentment until i was hard enough to survive them. but being hard as stone isn't the same as being whole.

somewhere in the basement of my memory, there is a version of them that didn't smell like smoke. a version where his hand was holding hers and her voice didn't have a serrated edge. but that version is a hopeless wish and that wish didn't have the strength to blow out the candle.

i finally stopped fighting the heat; i am not the one trapped in a burning house anymore because i’ve always been the match they used to destroy each other. i am the daughter of a burned tragedy.