“Rent” by Sen Kathleen

I found home,
at first, I was apprehensive,
but there you were, ready.

I was apprehensive, 
but my bags were already in the hall,

And then came the excitement—
intoxicating—

but I had only just gotten comfortable in our bed
when the wallpaper began to peel.
Two years in:
termites made the beams rot
and your attitude soured.

Year 3:
the lights went out.
I would search for you by tracing my hands on the peeling walls,
but you didn’t want to be found — so I screamed
until you came out of hiding.

We only made love with the doors locked.

Year 4:
I patched leaks from the upstairs bathroom 
that you denied had overflown
the leaks I had to prove were real.

Year 5:
we stopped pretending
we could climb the steps fast enough to unclog the drain.
I stopped searching for you in the dark.
We didn’t care that we couldn’t see each other in our bed.

Then, I tripped over your suitcase.

Sen Kathleen is a New Jersey-based Hatha & Trauma yoga instructor, reiki practitioner, and writer. She is also the creator of The Soul In Space. She’s contributed a wide variety of content; interviews, informative articles, opinion pieces, poetry, and fiction pieces to a number of publications like Lunch Ticket & Harness Magazine. Currently, Sen works full time as an account manager for a media company. She graduated from Antioch’s MFA program, for fiction & poetry, in 2020. She is also a board member for the non-profit organization, Empowering Her and the Trauma Informed chair for the Honor Yoga Foundation. Her goal is to share experiences, to tell stories, and to share what she knows and learns with her family & community.

Featured Photo by Daniel Bosse on Unsplash