My grip locks around the key. Aching fingers, tense and twitching, bury the rusted metal in my skin. I shouldn’t be here.

       I’m not sure what possessed me to look for the key after all this time. The temptation crept up in the languid days of autumn. At first, it was a passing thought. It caught my attention like a dripping tap. One drop would perk up my ears and for a few seconds I’d sit, completely consumed in my curiosity. But just as quickly as the thought came, so too would it leave. At least in the beginning. Only a few weeks later, the enduring drips in my brain had become a tsunami. I was drowning in myself. Salt water and silt packed my lungs and invaded my veins, washing loose all the rot in me.

       So, here I am. On a rain-dappled street I once knew, squeezing a key I shouldn’t own, and staring at the house that haunts me.

       The house itself is as I remember it. A typical Glasgow new build with its sandy bricks and dark roof. My gaze wanders to each of the windows but all the blinds are pulled shut. I wonder what it looks like inside. It’s strange to think of it as anything but my home. When I close my eyes, I still see my mother dancing around her easel; paintbrush in one hand, wineglass in the other. I still smell her homemade soup, drifting from the kitchen with the songs of Joan Baez. I still feel every surface in my bedroom; the rip in the wallpaper, the wicker chair, the computer table I knocked over as I stumbled through my first kiss.

       When this became my home, I was a bright-eyed fourteen year old, excited for a new chapter in my life. Moving house was something my family and I did often. A symptom of awful neighbours, divorce, and the aftermath of divorce. I always enjoyed the process. Packing away all the little parts of myself and rediscovering them on the other side. A side where photo albums, diaries, and trinkets were old and new all at once. I never felt sad to leave any home I lived in. Except this one.

       I caress the dimpled brass in my grip. How easy it would be to fall into the lock’s embrace; a few twists and clicks of metal and I’d be home again.

       A bitter laugh erupts from my lips, seizing hold of my body. This is not my home. It has no space for me between its walls. Say I did open the door… nothing would be the same. The stairs would creak in disgust at the feeling of my unfamiliar weight. There would be no dance of paint and pinot grigio, no fresh cut parsley for soup, no Joan Baez hailing my return. The rip in my wallpaper wouldn’t remember my nails picking at the plaster. The wicker chair and computer table would be gone, long since packed away with all the other parts of myself that never reached the other side.

       When we left this house, photo albums and diaries lay cold in their boxes, whispering my obituary to themselves over and over. My schoolbag vomited up textbooks and swallowed pills, pyjamas, and everything else needed for an overnight hospital stay. Jazz shoes became slippers. Bus fare lay rusting in the dark belly of a piggy bank. I was a rotting cavity of a person. All clicking bones, crumbling teeth, and weeping eyes. This was no life. I was existing in a waking death; a soul-destroying punishment for a sin I don’t remember committing. Schooldays, friendships, drama classes, and teenage kisses had all fallen through my fingers and I was left holding nothing more than a blanket and a key I hid from the landlord.

       Rattling its cage, my heart demands action. Movement. Anything but just waiting here stupidly in the rain, staring at the home that hoards all of me. Everything I should have been. If I were stronger, maybe I’d toss the key and vow never to come back here. But that dripping tap still echoes in my mind; I need to be able to pretend, even for a moment, that I could open the door, and everything would be as it was.

       Sucking the air through my fillings, I slip the key in my pocket. The house cries for me, raindrops spilling down its bricks, as I turn my wheelchair and roll away.