For two months it was just me in the prison of a stranger’s home
The four walls guarded the bed that was an inch too narrow to offer any comfort
The blanket that could never keep me warm enough in an impressively large house without any heating
and the wooden wardrobe with chipped baby blue paint in which every sound of me
was carefully folded for 64 days.
Me, my laptop and two knocks on the door when it was time to eat
Stickers on the very small window that played a game with the sun rays;
If they were unable to slide their palm into the back pockets of the carpet or
Run their fingers over the uneven surface of my headboard and blow in my ear
Underneath the tangled nodes of my hair,
It won.
I got accustomed to the lack of light on the picture of Winnie the Pooh and the calendar with pictures of puppies hanging on the wall
My eyes would graze them as I walked nervously around the room, taking calls from back home
Trying to hold up the white shelves (storing three books they sent me from Sarajevo,
A dusty camera I hadn't used since my first week here and
Copies of Italian grammar exercises)
Which was beginning to cave in beneath the weight of the Loneliness
I pretended not to own.
When I was packing up, I remembered a saying I once heard:
The places at which you leave most things are the places you'd most like to return to,
So I made sure to take everything with me,
To stuff everything in a single suitcase at the risk of paying for overweight at the airport.
Truly, it was miraculous how I hadn't forgotten a thing,
Not even the loneliness.
