i don’t have a sense of home. what i have are merely wooded hollows and four walls thinly dusted with age — silent witnesses and accomplices to my tear-jerking crimes and light midnight screams. home to me is a room to myself, a secluded area that grants me solitude in which i can hear myself think. in which i can look up to the freshly painted ceiling yet it’s my eyes that leak. my eyes keep leaking as if there was a blizzard in my head and my eyes burn and burn until my eyelids unfurl cascades of tears.

home is no longer a place i seek shelter in. it’s an escapism, a getaway, much more like a facade than it is reality. it gives me a false sense of protection because it makes me miss out on cruel novelties and words that shower me like knives. it prevents me from ever going out into the open and let myself be gunned down by the enemy frontlines. it helps me focus, yet it helps me drift apart — keeping me astray. it makes me feel more aloof, more reserved, and much more secluded like a remote area in the woods that became the background of many spine-chilling legends.

i haunt. i loom out of the corners of my own room on the daily to haunt my own thoughts. i haunt until i hurt. i pull myself back to refrain myself from living because i’m afraid of undesired outcomes. i’m afraid that every action i make would lead to my demise and every path i pave would embark me on a journey of constant agony. so i haunt. i keep to myself. i linger around nothingness and sharpen my knives until my senses become dull. i deplete myself of anything sentimental until home is just white walls. until a house is no more than wooded hollows.

then i realised, i’ve become a ghost. not the one that enchants you aghast, not the one that keeps you trembling on the edge of your seat — clutching something that makes you safest (a home, i must say). but the kind of ghost that lingers and clings onto your shoulder, the kind of chill that is sent everytime there’s wrong. because i’m the embodiment of wrong. i’m the epitome of unfamiliarity, i’m the sore thumb. i don’t have a sense of home, i latch onto things i find comfort in doing until everything becomes unfamiliar and i no longer recognise the things i’ve loved the most.

is it faith? is it boredom? does it make me less faithful if my heart could not beat the same rhythm it did a month ago? does it render me evil and heartless if every supposed home i met turned out to be nothing more than a refuge? all i knew is that even the sweetest of drinks eventually became something i merely caught a deluge in.

i enjoy this everchanging world. yet i fear it. i fear that any change that comes is not always welcomed. i fear that i forget the past — how everything used to be — while not knowing it affects me more than i let it. oh how do i say it? how do i say that my biggest fear is that i forget before i can ever heal? i forever fear that my wounds remain open and untreated because i’m stuck on haunting and haunting; and i’m scared that one day i will bleed out and die not knowing what caused it.