House of Forgotten Names

(a dream said softly)

We went back.
To the place I was born.
Albuquerque, though the air felt thinner—
as if memory had taken the oxygen first.

They said it was our house.
But it wasn’t.
Not the one etched into camcorder reels,
not the one with the grey, the fuzzy tiger-striped couch
and fluted light switch plates.
Still—there we stood,
as if recognition were optional.

I told my mother,
“I don’t remember this place.”
She smiled like mist.
Soft. Dreamy.
As though she remembered enough for the both of us.
Her smile like someone remembering what never quite belonged to them either.

But she spoke as if it were all true.
As if this was always the house.
As if the past didn’t edit itself.

The house kept changing.
One moment, a snug bungalow.
The next, a palatial single-story.
Another, a rustic retreat with a playground outside my old bedroom window.

Time doesn’t tick in dreams.
It shifts.
Like grief.
Like memory.
Like identity when no one’s looking.

I walked about, as if a ghost in my own story.
Wandered through rooms that had never been mine,
but remembered me anyway.

Faucets dripping, televisions whispering static.
Unwatched.
Unwanted.
Unattended thoughts, still turned on.

Like all the things I was left to carry—
half-finished, half-forgotten.
But fully on.
Still loud enough to echo.

There were people who tended to the house.
One (a woman) tried to steal my phone—
and isn’t that always the fear?
That someone will take the one thing
you actually use to call for help?

But my mother—silent sentinel—recovered it.
Tucked it somewhere in “the basement,”
though we were still on the first floor.

The only floor.
A basement in a single-story home.
How like us—buried depth in places no one expects.
Pain where the blueprints say none should exist.

There was a room with a greeting card display.
Rife with arts and crafts, scribbled poems,
inked footprints.
And photos.
A little museum of Once was loved.

Then the closet.

My mother’s—massive.
A whole master bedroom of clothes and silence and leftover ambition.
A dominion of hangers and hushed fabrics.
And behind that—
a door.

Concealed behind the couture, I opened it.

Found my father’s “half.”
Smaller. Still hers in places.
Trespassing quietly, like a habit that never asked permission.

I left the door open.
She noticed.
Scolded me.

And like a good daughter,
I apologized.
Not for the mistake—
but for the mood.
Because I’ve always been the one
who closes doors others leave open,
and softens the air when it gets too sharp to breathe.

And then—him.

He appeared like he always does—
in the middle of a sentence I never finished.

Said something about property.
Like he used to.
Back when we joked about wealth
without knowing how much we’d really lose.

We were in college again.
Then we weren’t.

He left.
I let him.

Found him later,
joking with a girl whose laugh I knew.
The one who made his laugh sound fuller.

The one who made me feel forgettable.
I felt the sting—
but I didn’t bleed.

That’s progress.

Then my brother popped on over.
Said our older sister had driven nine hours with her whole family
to surprise my mom for Mother’s Day.

And just like that—
Austin disappeared.
El Paso took its place.

I wasn’t a college kid anymore.
I was me.
Now.
Thirty-something.
Still wandering.
Still watching doors open into places I didn’t know I was allowed to go.

The dream didn’t ask for permission to time-travel.
It just did.
Because memory doesn’t live in sequence—
it lives in feeling.

And what I felt most?

Was the ache of a house I never knew we still owned.
That I could’ve called sanctuary.
That I could’ve escaped to.
Would’ve needed on the days I thought about disappearing completely.

But I didn’t know.

Maybe because no one told me.
Maybe because I was always too busy
guarding doors that weren’t mine
and turning off the TVs
left on in other people’s grief.

Trying to live in homes that didn’t remember me.

But now?
Now I’m building one.

With real walls.
With my own blueprint.
Where closets aren’t mazes.
Where the faucet doesn’t leak.
Where I leave the door open on purpose
because finally—
I want me to come home.

And I know:
this house lives in me.

The sound of the wind is whispering in your head 
Can you feel it coming back? 
Through the warmth, through the cold, 
keep running till we're there 
We're coming home now, we're coming home now 
—Dotan, “Home”