This Loud House

A reflection on living with invisible illness.

When I am in pain

My body becomes a place

I don’t want to be.

And why should I have to practice presence, the gathering of my senses, when under my skin is writhing in wily waves?

I don’t want it, I don’t want you to have it, I don’t want you to know it.

It isn’t a skeleton, it’s not my bones, I don’t want my bones. The closets don’t matter. I want a quieter home.

All my cells and synapses inside myself are sounds I don’t want to hear.

I cry because I don’t understand why they cannot just be polite and quiet. I cry because I am my own noisy neighbor.

Do you go home through doors that screech and the only quiet one is the drawer by the sink that is filled with things you don’t know why you need?

Do your fire alarms stay at a constant high-pitched hum that sometimes hinders thinking past the drumming in your den because all the shelves are slowly slanting downward dropping their decor on the ground?

That is why it’s hard to stay, that is why it’s easier to just see and breathe, that’s when it isn’t as much of a catastrophe.

That’s how I don’t leave.

And my house, just like yours, lacks the right kind of everyone floor. It only holds our own two feet, you can’t come in, so you never quite see.

And the windows are soundproof but I decorate them with the seasons sparkling lights.

And the shingles shake with the shivers from the shrill cries inside but I keep them tarred down, they are tidy still.

When there are wailing wild creatures crawling around on the couches with their claws carving up the insides in the midst of their unloved outbursts, you observe my house and say “My, it’s so pretty. My, why hasn’t someone snatched that one up? Oh my my, it must be lovely inside.”

This house holds my all-things and self-things from sorrows to sunrise joy, singing as much as she screams. She is lioness vocal, and sometimes quite touchable, when approached with the right tender tone.

The lessons this loud house teaches by exorbitant breaches of comfort are uncountable and can cause tenderness immeasurably bearable.

It demands care with fervor and commands love without leniency and has no mercy at the cluster it causes.

When it is silent, it’s stars and sweet sadness commingled with sureness in now.

Why it’s so broken, I cannot yet quite say.

And in this loud house, I stay.