I want to be a different kind of person than the one I turned out to be. I want the things I do and the way I live to make sense, to be congruent with my values, preferences, and ideal aesthetic.

I want to be neat, not too neat, just functionally, reasonably situated. My things as tools, items at hand for me to manipulate, not as an artificial environment that I live in, fabricated to distract and entertain me like a hamster in its cage.

I want to feel pretty, and I think deep down, I won’t ever feel pretty in a stable and mature way until my home does as well.

But cleaning up won’t do it anymore. I don’t live in mess, I live in squalor; the walls need to be scrubbed, scoured. The floors are overgrown with roots, the vines creeping up kitchen counters and bedside tables.

I seem to infect, inhabit, and corrupt my spaces, a symbiote, a mass with vasculature, a cancer too insidious to ever get good margins on. I’m in its bones.

This place has been animated while my body becomes superfluous, reduced to a mere go-bag of blood and body fat, my own veins acting as an IV; to leave my house feels dissociative, like I’m astral projecting into the CVS drive thru.

During the winter, when the snow is fresh and the roads not yet plowed, the host succumbs, the possessor asleep inside as muscles atrophy and open sores fester and rot and gangrene. The filth does not hibernate, only its witness. As the frost turns to dew, mummified bodies and detritus show themselves.

Extended metaphor is the tool of cowards and revisionists: my home looks like shit.

The lady in the yellow wallpaper wanders the perimeter having noticed a recent and unwelcome change in the scenery. The bars of her prison, those which once defined her desperate urge to escape, have been twisted, spun on their axis, and now, looking in the mirror, see notices just how unflattering they are.

When did I get fat? she asks no one in particular. She approaches her unwelcome reflection, a mirror in the corner of the room, hoping to shatter it, to deny any confirmation of her deformity. Reaching out to grasp at its frame, she notices her arms, once tools for rattling her cage have become flabby and soft. She can't reach the mirror, and in desperation she begins picking at the wallpaper, a nervous habit she's picked up during her interminable sentence.

Once, she focused on the bars, ripping holes in them uselessly in a feeble attempt to escape. Now looking at her own form, she pulls at her edges. She defines her waist, smoothes her hips, tears at the piece between her legs where she'd rather sense distance than communion. After a moment of reverie, envisioning a body she wants but will never inhabit, she sees her fingernails stained with crusts of clotted blood.

Old scabs she remembers.