The House That Swallowed Me

I remember the night I disappeared. It wasn’t a vanishing act in the physical sense—my body was still seated cross-legged on the kitchen floor, back hunched like a wilted tree. But something deeper evaporated, like breath on cold glass—quiet, slow, irreversible.

The house around me had grown fangs.

It was 3:17 a.m. The refrigerator hummed a lullaby I couldn’t decipher, a low drone like the dirge of a dying choir. The wallpaper peeled in curling tongues, revealing the skeleton of the wall beneath. I stared into the eyes of a cockroach navigating the rim of a chipped bowl on the floor and felt kinship. We were both survivors of unseen wars, scuttling in search of meaning.

Earlier that day, I had lost my job—again. The email had arrived like a bullet dressed as an envelope. Polite, clinical, suffocating. We regret to inform you… But the regret was mine alone. It came in waves. Not of sadness, but of erasure.

I thought about calling someone—my sister, an old friend, even a therapist I hadn’t seen in years. But each name I summoned dissolved into silence, like letters written in water. I was stranded on the moon of my own mind, oxygen thin, gravity failing.

The house tilted.

I don’t mean metaphorically—I mean the floorboards groaned like tectonic plates shifting. The light fixture overhead buzzed into a frenzy. I pressed my palm to the linoleum, suddenly unsure if I was about to slide into some kind of mental sinkhole. My mind splintered into two voices: one logical and exhausted, whispering, This is a panic attack. The other voice laughed, low and strange: No, dear. This is the moment you break open.

And then—I did.

It was not the drama of screaming or sobbing or breaking furniture. It was quieter. Like the sound of fabric tearing underwater. A rift opened inside me, and I fell in.

Suddenly, I was in a vast cathedral of mirrors. Not the elegant kind—these were broken, jagged pieces suspended in air like shards of a shattered sky. Each fragment reflected a different version of me: younger, angrier, lonelier, high-functioning, hollow. Some wept. Some raged. One just stared at me, eyes flat like pondwater, lips sewn shut.

I tried to speak to her.

“Why are you here?” I asked, but the words echoed back as, Why are you hollow?

I didn’t have an answer.

From the shadows, a shape slithered forward—something serpentine, wearing a mask that looked disturbingly like my childhood face. It hissed, “You abandoned me.”

I backed away, crashing into a mirror that showed me five years ago, laughing at a dinner party, wine glass tilted, performing happiness like a trained actor. I hated her.

The serpentine thing laughed, low and guttural. “You built this prison with every lie you told yourself. Every smile you faked. Every ‘I’m fine’ you muttered through clenched teeth.”

I sank to my knees.

Suddenly, the cathedral collapsed into a spiral staircase carved from bones—my bones, I realized. Femurs and ribs forming steps I had no choice but to descend. Each footfall echoed like thunder in my chest. I was being unraveled, stitch by stitch.

At the bottom was a door made of flesh. Pulsing. Breathing. I pressed my palm against it, felt it quiver. And then it opened.

I stepped into a landscape that was both alien and familiar. A desert made of ash. Trees burned but never crumbled. The sky above bled colors I had no names for. In the center stood a child—me, around six years old—clutching a stuffed animal with its stuffing torn out.

She didn’t look at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“For what?” she asked, voice sharp.

“For leaving you here. For pretending you didn’t matter.”

She finally turned. Her eyes were galaxies of grief. “Do you know how long I’ve waited?”

A thousand lifetimes, I wanted to say. But time had no language here. Only feeling. And she was a universe of it. Her little hands reached up and pressed against my chest.

“I’ve been holding your pain,” she whispered.

It shattered me.

The grief I had buried beneath jobs, relationships, substances, affirmations, to-do lists—it erupted. I wept, not like a person crying but like a dam breaking. I wept for the years I spent being what others needed. I wept for the little girl who had learned to shrink herself so others could breathe. I wept until the ash turned to soil, until the trees sprouted new leaves, until the bleeding sky turned blue.

The child smiled.

She walked into me—merged with me—and I felt whole for the first time in my life. Not healed. Not fixed. But whole.

I woke on the kitchen floor, my face pressed against the cool linoleum. The refrigerator was still humming. A sliver of dawn had snuck through the blinds, painting gold on the counter.

And I breathed.

Not just air—but truth. The kind of breath that fills the empty spaces you never realized were starving.

Since that night, nothing and everything has changed.

I still battle anxiety, still wrestle with shame, still falter. But I am no longer afraid of my own shadow. I’ve learned that the darkness I feared was not my enemy—it was my wounded self calling out for attention.

Healing is not a destination. It’s a spiral. You revisit the same wounds with new eyes. But now, I carry a map etched in pain and wonder. I know the terrain. I’m not lost anymore.

So when the night comes, thick and suffocating, I light a candle in the cathedral of my mind and sit with the broken mirrors. I let them tell their stories. I hold the child’s hand. And together, we walk through the door again and again.

Not to escape.

But to remember who we are.