I've Lived in This Body for 29 Years and It Still Feels Like a Haunted House

This Body is a Haunted House

The creaks aren’t the floorboards.

They’re my joints.

This body has always been mine.

But it’s never really felt like home.

I’ve lived in it for 29 years—

long enough to memorize every pain,

every shortcut, every locked door,

every hallway that leads back to where I started.

But some days, it still surprises me.

Like a house with secret staircases.

Or a light that flickers in a room I haven’t entered for months.

It Has Good Bones, They Said

Doctors used to say I was healthy.

I looked fine.

Strong. Normal.

Maybe just anxious. Maybe tired. Maybe too sensitive.

They’d tap their pens against clipboards and tilt their heads.

“It’s probably just stress.”

“Growing pains.”

“Psychosomatic.”

That word still makes me flinch.

They didn’t know my joints slipped like loose hinges.

That my hips groaned with every step.

That my spine whispered threats in the dark—

subtle at first, like the ticking of a pipe before it bursts.

They didn’t see the drafts.

The invisible chill crawling through me,

the kind that no sweater or blanket could fix.

They didn’t feel how my muscles screamed silently

each time I stood too long or moved too quickly.

They didn’t know that pain could exist

without bruises, without breaks,

without proof.

Some Rooms Are Never Quiet

There’s a room in my chest where panic lives.

It’s small, but loud.

It rattles the windows when I try to sleep.

Behind my eyes, a storage closet filled with fog.

I walk in and forget what I came for.

Words vanish mid-sentence.

Thoughts drift like dust in shafts of light.

My knees are the stairs:

rickety, untrustworthy, loud when I least expect it.

My hands?

They’re the doorknobs that stick when I need them most.

And my neck—

the site of the scar, the surgery, the rewiring—

creaks like a door someone opened too many times

without ever fixing the frame.

It’s the seam where memory and migraine collide.

A zipper down the back of my skull,

stitched into my story whether I like it or not.

The Furniture Rearranges Itself

Some days, I wake up and everything inside has shifted.

The weight. The ache. The angle of gravity.

My balance is off.

I trip more.

I drop things I thought I had a grip on.

I bruise in places I don’t remember bumping.

I sit down and can’t get back up

without bracing myself against the wall

like it’s an old railing I installed out of necessity, not choice.

You’d think, after 29 years,

I’d know how to live here.

But the layout keeps changing.

The rooms expand and contract.

Stairs disappear.

Pain moves like furniture I didn’t agree to rearrange.

No one gave me a map.

I Keep Trying to Renovate

I’ve tried diets.

Therapy.

Supplements.

Breathing exercises.

Journals.

Medication.

Meditation.

Movement.

Some things help.

Some make it worse.

It’s like patching holes in the wallpaper

while the foundation groans beneath the floor.

I chase routines like keys I’ve misplaced,

hoping one might unlock something—

relief, if not release.

Still, I scrub the floors.

Still, I open the windows.

Still, I stay.

Because this body—

this haunted house—

is still mine.

Some people feel at home in their bodies.

I envy them.

Mine is full of echoes and cold spots.

Of locked doors and rooms filled with memories

I can’t quite reach.

But I light candles.

I clean the corners.

I hang art over the cracks.

I talk gently to the walls.

Because even haunted houses deserve tenderness.

Even they can hold love and life.

Even they can glow.

And if I have to live here—

I’ll make it beautiful anyway.