Home

This long week end, I went home. Like usual, I opened the gate using my old key. As I pushed the huge double entrance door, I saw that antique church bell hanging in front of me, untouched since the day I decided to live alone. Since I’ve been eying on that antique church bell since I was 10 as I wanted it to grace my own room, it’s always been the first thing I see whenever I go home. As I walk myself in the foyer heading towards my parents’ room, I went pass the living room and the dinning room, as usual. And like always, the pressure that I left behind rush through me like it missed me for some reason. I shove it off as usual and opened the usual heavy door where I found my parents watching TV together, as usual. I said a little hello and closed the door back and went straight to knock at my brother’s room where I found him and his workmates singing karaoke. I went to the room where me and my other brother share a room, and dropped my stuff down there and joked around with him a bit and went outside. Just like usual, I also played with the little kid that’s often seen running around the house. After that, I ate dinner, took a long hot bath, and tried to go to bed.

Two days after, we went back home to the old house where I grew up to visit our grandma who had been rehabilitating for two months now, after that incident of her attack. As I stared at those old walls, floors, ceilings and stairs, I thought that nothing much changed since the last time I’ve been there too. The only thing that changed were those that lived there – humans and animals alike. Her old gay attendant was replaced by a man who’s supposed to be her female attendant’s brother, and that her security guard who looked like a house boy, gain tons of weight on which, makes me wonder if he could still run if worse comes to worse that he would have the need to chance a burglar or something. Her old maids were still the same people though, while the number of her dogs, probably increased to 7 now, instead of 5. I heard, the other one died too. I kept staring at the usual furnitures, but no matter ho much I stared at them, the feeling wasn’t there anymore. When I sit my the dinning area staring at the Koi paintings at the wall, it made me feel like the old house were I grew up is gone and that it now was a different house.

When I went back to my place, yesterday. I look around it again, after cleaning it. I had a long sigh of relief afterwards. It feels as if I’m home, yet the home was never mine, in the first place.