Not Even the Warping Kind

I haven’t spoken to my mother since 2017, and it has been a good deal longer than that since I have ventured back to my childhood home, an unremarkable brick house with a shrieking red door in the northwest quadrant of Washington, DC. I don’t miss my volatile mother so much as I miss that house, which has grown mythological in my memory. When I lived there it was loud, and it often echoed with a discordant chorus of anger, but when I enter it in my dreams it is always steeped in silence.