The House with Two Doors

Part II — No Room for Me I leave that house and step into another, and my father’s voice is a lock snapping shut: Why are you always there? Why don’t you live there forever? If you want them so badly, don’t come back. If I walk with cousins, he speaks of rumours, poison in the wells, and says it’s for my own good to die of thirst. In my father’s mother’s house, I am measured and weighed: Faith too light. Phone too heavy. Clothes too loud. Voice too sharp. And around me grandmothers, aunts, uncles, parents their mouths pass my name like a rusted coin, cold in every palm, and tell me I am the stain on their good name. But I never carved these stories into the walls. I never rang the bell for the whole village to hear. I am just the echo in a house where no one listens. I stand in the space between two doors, each one locked from the inside, each with voices telling me to go to the other. There is no room for me here. No room for me there. Only the wind through the cracks in the walls, and the long, endless hallway where I keep walking, trying to find a place that doesn’t vanish when I open the door.