This Old House

For a long time, I mistook the slow shifting of the earth for stillness.

There were signs, small at first. Hairline cracks around the windows. A tilt in the floorboards. A door that no longer fit its frame. I told myself this was ordinary. What structure does not settle over time? I learned how to explain discomfort before I learned how to name it. Beneath the surface, though, the ground was always moving.

The house I lived in was not made of wood or stone. It was built from expectation and inheritance, from silence arranged as order, from rituals passed down like furniture no one ever questioned. From the outside it looked anchored. Polished. Safe. Inside, I learned how to shrink. How to carry the weight of unspoken truths through every room.

Then the earthquakes came.

From the outside it looked anchored. Polished. Safe. Inside, I learned how to shrink.

Not private tremors. Not the kind you whisper about. These were public ruptures. Life altering events that cracked everything open. What had been contained spilled outward. People I had never met studied the wreckage. Headlines carried what our walls could no longer hold.

Afterward, the house still stood. But it was no longer whole. And it was no longer mine.

I stayed anyway. Out of habit. Out of loyalty. Maybe love. I swept broken glass into piles. Pressed photographs back into crooked frames. I softened my voice. I learned how to disappear in my own life. I believed that if I gave enough, withheld less, tried harder, the structure might forgive me. Might make space. Might finally recognize me.

Some houses are not built for people who ask questions.

Leaving did not feel brave. It felt like grief. There was no scene. No announcement. Just a quiet closing of the door and the strange air of a life I did not yet know how to breathe.

Leaving did not feel brave. It felt like grief. There was no scene. No announcement.

Distance changes things. It sharpens memory and dulls illusion. I can see now how the rooms always echoed. How love in that place meant obedience. How the foundation had been unstable long before I arrived. I think about the version of myself who believed devotion could hold beams in place, and I mourn her. She tried so hard.

But I do not go back.

I build elsewhere now. Not something impressive. Something honest. A life with room for contradiction. Light enters through imperfect seams. The ground beneath me still shifts, but I recognize the movement. I listen to it. I adjust. I stay close to what is real instead of what is familiar.

The shape of that old house still lives in my bones.

It just no longer owns me.