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CEDARVILLE
REVIEW
14
HOME
BY MADISON HART
Home is not an eloquent language.
Doesn’t speak in complete sentences
Or always refrain from
(Home is far too real for that.)
interrupting.
Home speaks my life in stanzas like strands of Russian dolls.
Different faces and shapes and versions of myself stack between the walls, consonants and vowels
filling the spaces where home first conversed with me.
Its alphabet finds architectural shape in wooden beams that my mom would have always loved to
paint a different color, in new carpet that we bought after our dog died, in doorless frames that
resist the tendency to close off between kitchen and dining room and living room because living
life together means sharing it.
Home sounds like muffled conversation from the other side of my parents’ bedroom door at
night, like a verbal reminder to be safe as the screen door swings haphazardly closed behind us,
like laughter reverberating through lips and souls as we catch snatches of why it’s good to be alive,
like cries finally freed after the strain of being tucked behind social smiles, of silences that we
don’t feel pressured at all to fill.