staged ovenbird My parents’ house is for sale. It’s the house I lived in from the fifth grade until my early twenties when I moved out on my own. There are photos online, taken with a wide_angle_lens, meant to make the rooms look larger than they are. Everything is pristine. I take a tour through forty staged pictures and I recognize it all but nothing_is_home. The house has been stripped of everything resembling a memory. There are no family_photos on the walls. The artwork is sterile. The evidence of living has been bleached out so that a new family can imagine themselves living in the space. It is, according to the realtor, bad to leave any evidence of your own life on display because people want to think of the house as theirs. So my parents erase themselves completely, leave only furniture and spotless countertops. Maybe a new family can see themselves living there, but I can no longer see myself. When I go home in the summer I will get to stand in the house one_last_time. I will get to wander the hallways and drink the icy cold water from the bathroom tap. I will stand in the shower I cried in and sit on the deck where I used to read for hours. I will eat at the table that once belonged to my great_grandmother and pull plates from the cabinet that was hers as well. My parents will sell the dining room set and I will never see it again. I will touch the rough surface of the new wallpaper and let my feet feel the unblemished expanse of the new hardwood floors. I will look for the ghosts of my family_pets but they will already be gone. There is no phantom bed left to sleep in. Even that has been cleared away with vigorous dusting. The lawn has been subjected to weed killer so there will be no evidence of wilderness. A new family would not like to think that wild things might occupy their yard. Everything must be perfect, and perfect means empty, because a new family wants to write their own story and the house must be a blank_page. The realtor’s pictures scroll on repeat in my mind and I worry that they’re taking a sodden mop to all the cobwebby corners of my memory, deleting tenuous threads of my childhood, leaving my mind burnished and bare. I want to build a new house for my memories to live in but they resist capture. Maybe it’s better to set them free. Maybe, without the walls that made them, they will return to their most feral forms and go to live in the tall grass of some empty_lot where they can act out the past in a theatre_of_stars. When I open my mind they see_the_light and run. 250620 what's it to you? who go blather from