We returned to the house - it was inevitable, I say as we step over the boundary. It was always going to happen; we were always going to come back.
The house is empty, walls and floors bare save for the scraps of remembering. It was almost as if I could see what would have been left - I could see our ratty sofa pushed against the wall, the record player underneath the broken clock. I felt sure that if I turned my head to look I’d catch sight of my reflection in the mirror that hung over the mantlepiece, and yet, when I do turn, finally, neck aching against the strain of it, I find myself facing the blank, white wall.
The kitchen lay waiting, silent and empty. The hearth was as I remembered it, and as with the living room, I felt as though if I closed my eyes I could see the spices on the rack, the hanging basket filled with apples and tangerines. As with the living room it was still empty when I open my eyes; still empty when I drop my bags to the tiled floor. Cleaner now than it ever was when we lived here, I say to the empty room. Almost a joke - it was always clean, though not for lack of trying.
I move slowly up the stairs - I had always been worried about falling down them. Once a picture fell from the shelf that sat stout across the bannister and had split my lip. That was the closest I came to ruin between the 4 walls (if you were to exclude the roots of the house themselves). A split lip, a rivulet of blood on my quivering chin - I had cried, but only for a moment.
My old room was starkly bare, door already open and light streaming through the window in a haze, the glass webbed over with disuse.
It was as I remember leaving it.
Empty walls, empty floors - no bed, no bedside table on which to keep a bedside lamp. Just wooden floors and blank, white walls. It was as I remembered it.
I could feel the heartbeat of the house behind me, pressing in against the walls. Had it always been this loud? Had it always been so present? Maybe because the house was empty now, an amphitheatre of sound; an empty hall, footsteps like gunshots. I could feel my heartbeat in my throat as I turned to look at the door that was waiting behind me. Closed, as I remembered it. A gaping maw snapped shut in anticipation.
I opened the door, as I always did, and inside nothing has changed.
The room is full and the bed in the corner is made, the scattering of memories concrete on the walls and hanging from the curtain rails. Everything was as I remembered - standing sentry over the empty house. The ghost of something - someone - is locked in the room and surrounds me, pulling me close. I can hear the cat crying, somewhere underneath the spirit of the room, a ghost too: trapped in perpetuity in the monumental room. There should be dust I think, running my hands over the pristine dresser. Perhaps there is; dust so thick its created a new skin.
She’s still here, I think - still here between the curtains and the beams of sunlight. I can still hear the cat crying and I run from it, past the open mouth of my room, past the bathroom and up the winding stairs to the attic. We never had an attic - the house had always stood proud on two feet, no basement no attic, just ground and sky, but up I run anyway until I’m standing still, feet poised to walk but stuck atop the stairs. This was an attic I knew, from somewhere back in my mind. Someone else’s attic, someone else’s room; another memory from another life, trapped in the house. I wanted to walk, to inspect the space - figure out what was hiding behind the walls - but I was stuck to the top step, surrounded by the barbs of unknown. The floor was a minefield of injury - covered from wall to wall with drawing pins. I daren’t move a muscle for fear of impaling my bare foot. I could hear the heartbeat of the house in my ears, rushing like the ocean in a shell. Overwhelming, the water seemed to crash around me, and then I heard you yell. 

I turned down the stairs and saw you, harried and upset, knee deep in water, blue and foamy.
The basement has flooded, you say. The basement is flooding and we don’t know where the water is coming from.