When Your Home Becomes Your Enemy

Deborah B

creative partner Julia Pascal

The cliché
A home is a sanctuary. There’s no place like home. Home is where the heart is.
Home is where we are supposed to feel safest.

Is this true?
What if the floors and walls hiss?
Spit?
Sting?
Go to hell they say.

This is how attack comes.
Day
Vibrations in the body.
Vibrations in the head.
Night
Hand shake
Skin stabbed
Arrows, hundreds, thousands
Head so heavy I can’t hold it up
Heart thumps, thumps, thumps
Slow handclap
Will that calm it down?
No!

Change the bed.
A child’s bunk for a woman fifty plus
Where is my dignity?
A sofa?
But the walls still hiss
Hide in the bath?
But look, the walls are here too.

Have I mentioned the noises?
Low, grinding rhythmic thumps like a car racing over speed bumps
Low thrum of an engine
High pitched beeps
Morse code?
Who is trying to contact me?
Is this war?
Beep
Beep
Beep

Take a pillow
Cover my ears
It gets louder.
But where is the sound coming from?
The walls?
The floor?
No!
It is inside me!

I can do one night without sleep
Two
Even three, four
If I pummel my calves
Stretch
Switch brain waves from fear
Fretting
And the noise
Fool its crafty plans
With solfeggio and the curved sound from Tibetan bowls

Is there any answer? 
I can go out.
The walls cannot follow me
Nor the floor.
Will the noise in my head stop if I breathe?
Look at the sun?
The trees
The leaves
They have no walls around them
I must look
Look
Look