Don't come back home.

Don’t come back home. Because the night-light guided footsteps of your dream sleepwalked right through my sleep, trampling the simple pleasures of fatigue asunder.

Don’t come back home. Because every time you do, it becomes a new home all over again where I fumble against forgotten passwords of switches and rusty locks, where the pillows forget the curve of my neck, ad where the stove splutters to life only after being asked twice.

Don’t come back home. Because you threw open windows and doors that swept in reams of sunlight that had snubbed my welcome all along through doorcracked shadows.

Don’t come back home. Because you painted in hot oil all over its bare majesty, listened to the mute cries of empty nooks and shelves too proud to ask for sheets and sofas, and left me a difficult cleanliness to live up to. Sentenced. To a constant lifting up to looking down, to dusting what is beneath, to bury dead cockroaches and dead loves, to ignore the grime at the bottom to hiding the crime floating on top of a conscience.

Don’t come back home. Because even your silent presence dimmed the clanks, honks, reverse gear tunes, tears and coughs of the roaring world into a soothing song to which life was danced to. And without you, my solitude has soured into a seething anger at all sound, be it the cooing of doves, the slap of soaped cloth against the washing stone or the banging of doors. Doors that you won’t ever leave unlocked again, laughing cheekily at feeble ghosts that lurked in the dark, waiting for you to leave.