The House That Wasn't There

I dreamt of a house that was never my own,

With windows that blinked when the moonlight had flown.

Its shutters would sigh with a voice made of rain,

And the door knew my name though I never explained.

It sat on the edge of a forest so still,

Where the trees held their breath with an ominous will.

The path to its gate was a whisper of dust,

And the lock on the fence had long traded for rust.

I stepped through the hush with a heartbeat of dread,

As silence grew thicker than words ever said.

The vines on the porch moved like serpents in prayer,

And shadows hung low in the sepia air.

A doorknob of bone met my trembling hand,

It turned with a click like a spell unmanned.

Inside, it was neither alive nor dead,

Just echoes of moments no tongue ever said.

A portrait of someone who looked like my face,

Hung crooked and smudged in a tarnished frame’s grace.

The clock on the mantle ticked backward in time,

As if it devoured each second it mined.

The wallpaper peeled like regret from the soul,

Revealing old maps with no reachable goal.

A child’s voice giggled behind a closed door,

And suddenly silence was louder than war.

I found in the hallway a mirror of ice,

Reflecting a version of me not quite right.

My eyes in the glass had forgotten my name,

They stared back with hunger, resentment, and flame.

I reached for the knob of the next unseen room,

But the air turned to velvet and smelled like perfume.

A music box sang though it lay on the floor,

And spun without winding, demanding much more.

The bed in the corner was perfectly made,

But the pillow still held the shape of a blade.

A journal lay open with ink still wet—

Each page was a memory I hadn’t lived yet.

“You will return,” the last sentence decreed,

In handwriting crafted from something that bleeds.

A creak in the boards drew my gaze to the stair,

Where footsteps descended with no one there.

I followed, because the house wanted me to,

And fear was a leash it had fastened too true.

The basement was colder than midnight alone,

With jars full of whispers sealed under stone.

I found on the shelf a bottle of sleep,

Labeled with years that no one should keep.

A chair in the corner rocked slow, then fast—

As if some old grief had come home at last.

I blinked and the candlelight fractured and screamed,

Showing me faces from lives I had dreamed.

They wept in reverse, their tears crawling up,

And drank from an ever-refilling cup.

“Leave now,” said a voice from a keyhole-sized crack,

“Or stay and forget the path that leads back.”

But I couldn’t move—was I guest or the host?

My name on the walls began to compost.

“It’s not a house,” the staircase confessed,

“But a body of memories never addressed.”

“You built this,” the cupboard coughed dust in my ear,

“Each lie, each longing, each swallowed fear.”

I screamed, but it echoed as laughter instead,

And the laughter gave birth to something undead.

A figure emerged from the shadow’s embrace,

Wearing the skin of a long-lost face.

“You were me once,” it crooned like a bell,

“Until you escaped and forgot to tell.”

Its fingers were stories I never wrote down,

And its voice was my voice, just stripped of its sound.

I ran for the door but the floor stretched wide,

Swallowing steps with each lurching stride.

The walls bent inward like mouths to a feast,

And the chandelier dripped tears of the deceased.

“Let me go!” I howled, “I don’t belong!”

But the ceiling replied with an unfinished song.

My name rearranged on the ceiling tiles,

Spelling secrets I’d buried in childhood files.

I clawed at the frame of the entry I knew,

But behind me the house had begun to renew.

The vines turned to veins pulsing over the stone,

And the portrait now breathed with a life of its own.

I felt myself splinter, fracture, and blend,

As the past and the present refused to end.

Then silence returned, not gentle but fierce,

And pierced through my mind like a cathedral’s spear.

The house whispered stories I tried not to hear—

Of futures unlived and a fate too near.

“You’ll visit again,” the banister sighed,

“Each time you forget the parts that died.”

The door, once ajar, had turned into flame,

And I wore its heat like ancestral shame.

I woke on the lawn with dew in my throat,

And a leaf in my palm shaped like a note.

It read: “Return, when the night’s at its thinnest,

And we’ll show you the rooms you’ve hidden the deepest.”

I fled without shoes, my name on my tongue,

Unsure if I'd dreamed or simply begun.

But sometimes at dusk, I smell candle and clove,

And feel the old path tugging under my toes.

The house that was never there waits just ahead—

And I fear I’ll return when I forget what I’ve read.