The Houses I Inhabited Without Ever Living There

I have wandered through houses that never belonged to me.

I crossed their thresholds like a trespasser of dreams,

my shadow spilling across carpets woven for other feet.

Their staircases curled upward like questions without answers,

their windows opened not onto landscapes

but onto versions of myself I almost became.

Each house carried its own weather:

a drizzle of forgotten names in the entryway,

sunlight folding itself thin in empty kitchens,

storms of silence gathering in basements.

I breathed them in like borrowed air,

lungs filling with dust and possibility.

Some rooms were already inhabited—

not by people, but by impressions.

A child’s laughter clung stubbornly to curtains,

a quarrel rattled against the wallpaper,

the sound of slammed doors still vibrating in the hinges.

There were coffee stains on a counter I never used,

a radio humming songs from a year I never lived,

a rocking chair that kept swaying

long after I stepped into the room.

Bedrooms carried their own haunting.

One held a bed that sighed under my weight,

as though it remembered someone else’s body.

The pillow smelled of lilacs,

a scent too intimate to belong to me.

In another, a wardrobe stood half-open,

filled with dresses for a life I never wore.

I traced their fabrics with trembling hands,

feeling the outlines of a ghost-self

who might have danced, or fled, or loved differently.

Attics were museums of dust and unfinished thoughts.

I found boxes labeled in handwriting I didn’t know,

but the names inside still felt familiar.

Sunlight cut through the beams like broken hymns,

illuminating photographs of people with my eyes,

my mouth,

my smile—

except they were strangers.

Basements carried the smell of earth,

as if the ground itself remembered weight and sorrow.

Pipes groaned with voices I almost recognized.

In one, I found a jar of marbles

that clinked like bottled stars;

in another, a trunk filled with shoes,

each pair worn down by a journey I never took.

I have stood in kitchens where the kettle hissed

though no one had set it to boil,

in parlors where clocks ticked

in rhythms older than my heart.

Sometimes the wallpaper peeled back

like skin revealing veins of memory,

the plaster beneath marked with penciled heights of children

who never bore my name.

Every house became a mirror,

but one that reflected not my face,

only the outlines of all the lives I could not live.

Some staircases spiraled into nothing.

Some doors opened into corridors

that narrowed into air.

The houses shifted as I breathed,

like they were alive,

like they were remembering me

even as I was forgetting myself.

I never signed a lease, never carried a key,

yet I belong to them as surely as they belong to me.

I dream their ceilings,

their cracked plaster constellations.

I recognize their windows in the eyes of strangers,

their floorboards in the rhythm of passing trains.

Sometimes on unfamiliar streets

I feel the ghost-hand of a doorknob against my palm—

cold, certain,

waiting.

To inhabit is not always to live.

Sometimes it is only to haunt.

To drift through borrowed walls,

to carry addresses etched in silence

like letters that never reached their destination.

I have been the tenant of absence,

the lodger of dust,

the quiet intruder in lives unlived.

And still I return,

again and again,

to those houses.

Half-real, half-imagined,

their roofs sagging under the weight of rain,

their gardens gone to seed,

their staircases still expecting my footsteps.

They are not mine,

but I am theirs.

Each house is a page,

each room a stanza,

each echo a word that writes itself in me.

Together they form a book I cannot close,

an atlas of phantom homes,

a geography of lives unlived,

and I—

I am the ghost moving through the margins.