They always told me it was a beautiful place. That the tree in front of the house used to bloom before all the others, pink blossoms bursting through the end of winter like they couldn’t wait any longer. That I used to sit beneath it in a little blue hat, reaching out for petals as they fell. That the light in the house was soft, and the floors warm, and the air smelled like amber and clean blankets.
They told me those stories so many times I began to see them, even though I couldn’t remember them. That’s why I slipped my Converse on when my parents asked if I’d like to accompany them back up to Malden, to my childhood home that we were renting out.
We returned as a family. The renter on the east side of the house was finally moving out, and my parents wanted to check in: “just to see if it’s still got potential,” my father said. They spoke like we were scouting out a summer retreat. I think they could tell I was bored already.
But the other side of the house, the west, had been left untouched. Nobody had rented it, and nobody had wanted to. That part had just been there all this time. Still and silent, like it was marinating in its own dust.
While they talked with the renter, a tall man with dark clothes who was supposedly moving out soon, I wandered off. Through the narrow kitchen. Past a hall I barely remembered. Into the part of the house we never talked about. The part we’d left behind before I’d grown old enough to remember it.
It wasn’t eerie at first. Just old. Dust swam in the sunlight coming through faded curtains. A chipped mug sat on the counter. A child’s drawing clung to the fridge, held by a magnet shaped like a strawberry. An orange towel lay folded on the couch, untouched but not unloved. It felt paused, not abandoned.
I drifted into my father’s old workroom, easily identifiable by the old desk and torn up leather chair. It felt different. The desk wasn’t neat like I’d imagined. It was scarred, deep grooves along the edge, like someone had gripped it too hard, too often. There were broken pens in the drawers, their insides long dried up. A dent in the wall near the floor. The chair missing a wheel.
The kitchen was no better. The table had faint burn rings. Not from candles, but from forgotten mugs. The cabinet doors sagged. The whole room sloped just enough to feel a little wrong. There were no obvious signs of disaster. No broken windows, no bugs, no blood. Just quiet stress. As if something had sat here for a long time, slowly rotting the foundation.
This wasn’t the house from the story. And yet… it was. I didn’t find a hidden diary. There were no revelations scrawled across the walls. What I found was simpler than that, and sadder. I found a room where love had once tried — and failed — to make a home. A place my parents had worked to forget, but couldn’t.
Back outside, the tree was still standing, brittle and bare. I looked at it for a long time. That story, about the blossoms, the little blue hat, the warm floors, wasn't just something my parents repeated out of habit. It was protection. A way to turn something hard into something beautiful. A version they could live with. A version they could give me.
I used to think a story had to be true to matter. But that story, the one they told, was true, not in fact, but in feeling. It gave me something they couldn’t give themselves at the time: softness.
What can a single story do? It can cover what hurts, long enough to let you grow past it. It can make something unlivable feel like a home. It can carry love across time, even if the place itself has been hollowed out. It can bring you back. Even if what you return to isn’t what you thought it was.
Looking back now, I admire my parents for leaving. Rewriting that story in their own way. Not for lying to me and my brother, but for planting pink blossoms in a place where pain had once grown.