Haunted House.

I write at night because it’s when the rest of the world is quiet enough to hear my own thoughts.

The tv is off, the ice maker isn’t grinding, the dog isn’t panting, and there is no one engaging me in conversation (either verbal or in text).

I’m left with just the sounds inside my brain, which often feel like thirteen different voices all vying for attention (plus a jukebox that always gets stuck on one song).

The voices change all the time, sometimes screaming, sometimes singing, sometimes a whisper barely loud enough to make it into my conscious awareness.

They fight to be heard, clanging pans or dancing around the different corners of my head or skateboarding around the scaffolding that’s holding this whole ceiling up (the ceiling being my sanity in this bizarre metaphor).

Some of them don’t try so hard to be heard anymore.

Those ones tend to wander silently from room to room, unsure of what they’re doing there, but also unable to leave.

Like ghosts landlocked to the place they died.

Cursed to exist until their unfinished business is tended to.

My brain is a haunted house.

And I am no ghost buster.