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The House Inside My Skull

Inside my skull

there is a house

that never sleeps.

Its corridors are lined
with mirrors made of old wounds,

and every mirror
insists on showing me
a different version of myself.

In one room,

Guilt sits like a tailor,

measuring my mistakes
with a yellow tape
that stretches across decades.

In another,

Fear is a locksmith,

changing the shape of every door
just before I arrive.

Nothing fits.

Nothing opens.

Nothing stays.

Meanwhile,

Memory works in the basement,

a silent archivist

cataloguing forgotten afternoons,

preserving heartbreaks
in glass jars,

pinning dead conversations
like rare butterflies.

Sometimes

I hear them fluttering.

Psychologists call it rumination.

I call it

a graveyard teaching itself
how to sing.

The brain is strange.

It builds cathedrals
out of tiny accidents.

One careless sentence

can become a religion.

One abandonment

can become a climate.

One betrayal

can alter the migration route
of every future hope.

And still,

we continue.

What remarkable creatures we are—

walking ecosystems
of invisible weather.

Some people carry monsoons
behind their smiles.

Some carry droughts.

Some are entire oceans
pretending to be cups of tea.

For years,

I believed healing meant
demolishing this house.

Breaking every wall.

Silencing every ghost.

But grief,

that ancient architect,

whispered otherwise.

It said,

“The crack is not your enemy.

It is the window
through which tomorrow enters.”

So now,

when anxiety hangs its dark laundry
across my thoughts,

I do not fight it.

I simply open another window.

When loneliness arrives,

dragging its suitcase of echoes,

I make tea for both of us.

When sorrow plants its black garden,

I water it carefully,

for even suffering

contains seeds
that do not yet know
their own flowers.

And on certain nights,

when the moon rests

like a silver bandage

upon the forehead of the world,

I walk through the rooms
inside my skull

and discover

that I was never a broken house.

I was a lighthouse,

mistaking my own storms

for ruins.

classcommunityconfusioncouragedeepfree verse

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