It's been a year since my entire life changed.
It's like the word loss was scribbled in the smoke; 70 degrees and sunny and there I was all alone in the middle of the street, my bare-feet on the cool black pavement. I forgot to grab my shoes. I was completely still in the midst of complete chaos. I couldn't find my mother anywhere - I wouldn't learn until later that she had ran from what was in front of her, that she had ran towards something and away from me.
All I could do was scream. Scream is too nice of a word for the sound that came out of me but shriek, beg, and plead won't make you hear it either.
My neighbors held my body together as I started to convulse right there in the middle of the street where it was 70 degrees and sunny and a teenage boy was snapchatting the worst day of my life. My body shook and shook with guilt. The man that I fucked a few months ago told me that sometimes when I'm sleeping it still does. We didn't last long.
The kitchen went first. My mom had spent years collecting various forms of rooster décor to fill it with; salt shakers, clocks, towels, even wall art – they were everywhere. Fifty-two fake roosters in a kitchen no one ever ate in. You don't realize how much of your identity is intertwined in to the corners of your home until there's nothing left of it. Memories and secrets hidden in the creaks of old floorboard, pieces of myself melting away.
When the flames met my bedroom window, I remembered how my high school sweetheart would throw rocks at it in the middle of the night like we were in a cheesy 80's movie when in reality we were really just toxic. After that, I stopped watching. I sat in the back of an ambulance, black smudged on my forehead as if it were Ash Wednesday, as if anything about this day was Holy. It was six days before my mother spoke to me again. We still don't talk about how she went missing from me. I am still not sure if she ever returned.
I can't forget the smell of all the hotel rooms I didn't belong to - chlorine and perfectly made beds much like the one I no longer owned. Some nights it was my gold Ford Focus; I slept better on these nights surrounded by windows and doors I was familiar with.
My friends did their best to fill in the spaces where my family should have been. They say that blood is thicker than water but They also say that water is what my body is made of, so really I don't know who to trust. I just know that I'm grateful.
After a year, I've realized that home is no longer a place to be, but a feeling to be had. Sometimes I take this literally and crawl in to the skin of the men that I'm with. I'm working on this with Laura, my therapist. She said that running helps. This morning I ran to work and then ran back and ran some more, and somehow I still never made it home.
