Chapter Text
Everyone's convinced
It's a government drone or an alien spaceship
Either way, we're not alone
I'll find a new place to be from
A haunted house with a picket fence
To float around and ghost my friends
No, I'm not afraid to disappear.
The billboard said "the end is near"
I turned around, there was nothing there,
Yeah, I guess the end is here.
I Know The End - Phoebe Bridgers
The first thing I noticed when I stepped inside my childhood home after all that time was the silence. That place had always been so crowded with the five of us, it wasn’t big enough to house our family. We made it work though, even if that meant I had to sleep in the same room as my brothers.
I had grown accustomed to having a room of my own in the years I spent at New York for college and then later when I decided to move to that city permanently. I shared a flat with a couple of friends, that’s true, but at least we slept in separate rooms. So by that point I was used to sleeping without hearing someone else’s snoring.
But being alone in my childhood home felt wrong. Without them, it seemed much bigger than it really was, and that wasn't right.
Our house in District 12 had two floors, on the first one there was the bakery. The business had been owned by my father, and his father before that. I was in charge of the cake decorations when I was little and after that I still had the habit of baking whenever I was stressed with something. I never thought I would inherit the bakery, being a third son, but I had been wrong. It had been closed for a few months at that moment, for obvious reasons. My therapist suggested that I could maybe turn it into an art studio, but I don’t think I could do that. It would be too much.
Everything seemed like too much to me.
The second floor, just above the bakery, was the actual flat where we lived in. It counted with a small living room, a kitchen, a bathroom and two bedrooms: one for my parents and one for my brothers and I. Someone -Delly, I guessed- had covered the furniture with bed sheets so they wouldn’t get wasted with dust while it was empty. I understood it had a good purpose, but the look of it gave me goosebumps.
I left my suitcase and the few bags I had brought with my belongings right next to the door that led to the staircase; I'd organize everything the next day. After several hours of journey and all the emotions of the day, I was too tired to do it at that moment. I hadn't been able to bring everything I would have liked, between traveling on a bus with limited luggage allowed and rejecting all help my friends had offered me; I mostly brought clothes and some basic things along with my painting materials, of course.
I had already eaten something on the bus, so I took some pajamas and my antidepressants from one of the bags and went straight to my old bedroom, not even bothering to take a shower, that would be a problem for my future self.
Never, in my entire life, had I slept alone in that bed. It felt too big for me, too empty, even if it was the same size as the one I had in the city. It didn’t feel right; but sleeping on the couch was not an option, at least not at that moment, my leg would ache like hell in the morning if I didn’t sleep in a proper place.
So I changed his clothes, took off my prosthesis, swallowed my pills and went straight to bed hoping to get some rest.
But there it was again. That dark shadowy silhouette at the feet of the bed, looking at me with its shiny white eyes, watching me ceaselessly.
It didn’t scare me, not anymore. I had grown used to it in the months since it had first appeared.
I closed my eyes and tried to get some sleep.
