Everyone seems to have convinced themselves that I prefer to be this way, which would make me laugh if I could do that, since they all hate what it takes to get me that way.

                This is not a clean house, which is what I love about it, and what I hate about it.

                When you’re laying underneath someone’s entire life, cloaked in their things, collected carpets and keys lost under furniture; when you are wearing their footprints as make-up every day, it’s a bit more complicated than “like.”

                You’ve heard people follow the phrase “if these walls could talk” with equal parts wonder and dogged fear.  It’s because inevitably, you understand that they are inanimate, unfeeling, the ultimate secret keepers.  So in front of them you’ve committed the most ultimate of your secrets. 

                You’re right.  Your walls have no mouths with which to betray you, no heart inside which judgment or envy might grow like cancer.

                But you’ve forgotten that your walls, your floor, your ceiling were all alive once.  We were trees, tall balsam sighing into a fresh breeze.  We were red dirt, freed from the crucible of so many geological years, mined and processed into the right colors, the hard tiled texture.  We are all wood and stone and elemental dye.

                Alive, unadulterated, we bore witness to our whole world, quietly watching so many animals extort our wealth, watching so much weather oxygenate our coals and dampen our flu.

                We brought that tradition with us.

                I am still looking up at everything they do.

                When I am dirty, I feel like I’m still participating in the cycle, the chain.  I can track the seasons by the temperature of the mud, the taste of dirt they leave scattered across me in waffled ridges.

                I watch tracks of my home’s residents stretch across my skin like such a dedicated hunter.  I theorize about their habits, their meals, their futures.  I am anonymous in my muck, but I belong.

                But when I am clean, my edges are sharpest.  It is removing an infection from a deep cut: white pain and an addictive itch.  Except they are the ones who get to feel the satisfaction of the scratch.  When I am so clean, I have no choice but to look right up at them.  There is no hypothesizing.  There are only secrets, bestowed upon a diary undesirous of them.

                I look up, and instead of my own branches, heavy with life, they are shining a mirror down on me, framing inside it a gaunt iteration of a thing I used to be.