"The House with the Locked Room"

"The House with the Locked Room"

They said she was whimsical. Called her the "daydream mom." The kind who painted stars on the ceiling and talked to her plants like they were old friends. People smiled at her in supermarkets—charmed by her wild curls and humming voice—but they never stayed long. The way her eyes wandered too far, like they were chasing things only she could see, made them uncomfortable.

They didn’t see the locked room.

I was nine when I started keeping the key on a string around my neck. Not because I was told to, but because I was the only one who knew when to open it. The room was where she kept her dark days. Where the mirrors were covered with bedsheets, and the clocks all ticked in reverse. She called it her “quiet place,” but I knew better. It was where her mind went when it didn't want to stay.

She would disappear for hours, sometimes a whole day, leaving cereal in the oven and the dog in the rain. And I—I would smooth her hair, whisper old lullabies back to her, clean the spilled pills before anyone noticed. I grew up learning how to erase her edges so the world wouldn’t see her come undone.

When I told the school counselor she sometimes forgot who I was, he chuckled. "Mothers get overwhelmed," he said. "You're just sensitive."

No one teaches you what to do when you're the child but also the safety net.

By twelve, I was fluent in her silence. I knew when her smile meant danger. I learned to cook dinner, sign field trip forms, and lie like a professional. “She’s just tired.” “She has a headache.” “She’s in her room resting.” But really, she was unraveling thread by thread behind the door no one asked about.

They all loved the idea of her. The mystical mother. The poet in the greenhouse. But I knew the difference between poetry and panic. I knew what it meant when the fridge was full of oranges and nothing else. When she spoke in rhymes no one else understood. When she stopped talking altogether.

Then, one day, she didn’t come out. Not after ten minutes. Not after an hour. I waited. I waited too long. When the ambulance came, they looked at me like I should have seen it coming. Like I hadn’t been screaming for years, just in a language no one wanted to hear.

Now, they say things like, “She needed help,” and “Why didn’t anyone say something?”

And I want to laugh. Or maybe scream.

Because I did.

I did, in every way a child could.

But children’s voices get softer the longer they go ignored.

Now they all look at me like I’m supposed to know what comes next.

As if I haven’t been dragging us both across this cracked floor for most of my life.

As if I’ve been keeping some magic solution in the locked room all along.

But the truth is... I’m tired.

And the door is still there.

Only now, it's in me.