Haunted House

I am a haunted house, and I wonder how you can love me. I am a ghost of every part of me that has died. I am a chilling in your bones due to the warmth that left me long ago. I cannot escape my own home -- the one inside my mind. How can you love me, when you cannot hold me without falling through me? When you cannot see me without also seeing all the things that left me this way. Abandoned, again and again. Sliced open, studied, and thrown away, again and again. Yet you love me, and you remind me, again and again. You say that I so much more that the chill I leave in those I love. I am so much more than the pain and the ache and the faulty heart in my chest. I am so much more than fallen through, I am fallen in. I am a part of you the way no one else could be, and that is how you can love a haunted house. A haunting heart like mine. You have wrapped me in silk and colored me in high hopes. You have taken away the splinters of lost love and stitched me up with dreams and desire. You have shown me a future beyond what I thought possible. You have shown me how to fly without wings and move forward without leaving a trail of blood behind me. You have loved me, and I have stopped hurting so damn much! You have loved me and pushed through the struggle with me. You have not left me to birth my own joy. You have made me worthy of living again. You have taken me — a haunted house of a person — and you have made me the sun. Warm and inviting. Melting away any frost left from the burden of fighting alone. You have become my sky, my solar system — my heart of hope.

—AshleyAnne