ROYGBIV
Home hums, the air thick like the inside of an overripe cherry split open. Kool-Aid stains on the counter, a bowl of Froot Loops dissolving into milk colouring it sweet, and a chair always slightly pulled out. Seat’s warm. Honeyed light drips through the blinds, just behind the boxy TV that’s been left on too long now making low buzzy sounds. Outside, the sun shakes. Vines creep through the cracks, flickers of backyards and then plants everywhere, dying, dying then replaced by new plants. The floorboards remember every step of your light-up sneakers and then the clack-clack of stilettos when you were learning to walk for a second time. A mirror splints into every shade of blue, folding into the hush; it’s the only thing that’s seen all of you. All the shadows and stairways leading nowhere, plot twists and close encounters, and then, finally, somewhere—a doorway, the shape of something just before you wake, realizing you’ve been singing the wrong lyrics to a song for years, and off tune and off path, here and alive and with a cloud in your belly, you still managed to make a home.