To my childhood home.

I left years ago, but I still think about you. The way your floorboards creaked under my dad’s footsteps every morning as he went to work, it served as my alarm clock. I tell others that you are the keeper of my memories. All of them. I introduced you to my first group of friends when I was 8 and you watched me fall in love with a boy for the first time at 16. You kept my secrets safe, too. You never told my parents when my friends and I snuck out during my senior year of high school and never told them when I was awake past midnight. You let me paint the insides of you with any color I wanted, even if it wasn’t practical.

You had your own cracks inside, like the rest of us. It’s from the countless slamming of my bedroom door from fights with my mother. I always told my friends it was from you settling into your foundation over the years. You were made to do that after all.

I wonder if the new owners have fixed them.

I still think about my window on the top floor, and how it looked over the backyard with the tree that split into two different directions. How my window was close enough to the top of the roof that I could climb on top of it, but never did. I feared the unsteady slant of it and the drop that waited below. I still remember which exact steps on the stairs creaked with my step, and how I avoided them late at night to not wake my parents. I can still see the empty room up the stairs, the one we never used. But I went in from time to time if I wanted to talk to you. I can still picture all the different routes I took to get home to you. All the backroads lead to you, but there was only one that went through our small town.

Straight.

Right at the gas station.

Left at the stop sign.

Make the first left.

Turn right onto our street.

I still remember all the little things about you.

I left years ago. But with every new friend I meet, with every new lover I untangle myself in front of, I tell them about you.

I say, “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

But I always remind myself that I am not with you anymore. And instead, you are just another place I have lived in, you become another story I tell, you become a distant memory.

And they might think, “It’s just her childhood home.”

But they’ll never see your stones set at the front, or the way your yellow facade changed with the location of the sun in the sky, or the way that your front door and the window above it resembled your smile.

I feel bad because all the ones before them had the pleasure of meeting you.

And when I meet the love of my life, that’s when I’ll come back. I’ll pull up to the end of your curved driveway, with the mailbox next to it saying “4663”. We’ll stand at your front door, and I’ll tell them about my first love with you.