Home is the place you can’t escape, and you try. You crave living with enough space for the parts of your body you’re scared to touch: the gentle undersides of your body that bruise easily.

You leave. You leave the streets that you remember with a dull, familiar ache. You leave maple and cypress, close-cropped grass like bristled hair, raked-up piles of fall leaves strong enough to hold your weight. You leave the old cemetery in your backyard, your house nestled on ground full of forgotten people.

You drive. You drive until the road turns the same colour as the sky, both dark. You want to pull over into a motel because your head is pounding, but the same red Jeep has been following you for miles.

For three weeks, you won’t call your parents. You sleep curled up on your side next to other women who talk or cry between dreams. You wash your underwear by hand until it turns grey, and walk all day until your hands are blue. You see your parents’ faces in rotten cantaloupes and bulging pears. You picture the two of them passing alongside you like heavy ghosts, their fingers brushing your cheekbones, hands in your hair. You think of your mother cooking blood sausage and Shepherd’s Pie with her hair in curlers, and then you let that image go.

You create something, make it real. You rent a room from a woman named Kathleen. She has a hard, angular face and wears corduroy and tweed. You live with Kathleen and her passive-aggressive cat. Together, you cook tofu and rice until the smell of soy creeps under the linoleum. You drink Scotch, and one night you and Kathleen find yourselves kissing, your cheeks flushing, too conscious of desire’s clean, sharp edge to consider protesting. You think that Kathleen knows the ache of you, that she can sense it. Her cat grows to resent you, and leaves feces on your pillowcase every morning.

You find a job. You work day and night; you work in Kathleen’s hand-me-down clothes. You work because you’re afraid of what might live in the spaces beyond thinking. Home, now, is a labyrinth of childhood stories you never had a chance to learn.

You lie in Kathleen’s bed and picture the cracked books in your parents’ library, their pages worn and loose like your aging father’s skin. The bedroom walls grow too tight against your shoulders; thoughts of home make you itchy. In your lover’s bed you lie awake and ache for your childhood books, but when Kathleen wakes you greet her dry-eyed and make toast and tea, wiping the crumbs off your shirt before they can leave a stain.

You phone home, and when you do the blood in your body freezes for a moment, petrified by its own longing. Your mother’s voice is different—softer, and slurred. You ask about your father and she pauses, with a sharp intake of breath.

You can’t turn the lights on, can’t leave the house. You sleep curled up on your side, remembering the women you knew once, who talked or cried between dreams. Your heart is a small and shrivelled thing without a pulse at its centre. Kathleen calls in sick to work and scrambles eggs in her underwear. She makes waffles, and warms tea. On the seventh day she goes to work and leaves you lying there, the most innocent of betrayals.

You leave Kathleen. You leave the house enclosed by trees, the smell of soy, and your lover’s palm with its inscrutable ridges. You stay in campsites and cheap motels. You visit towns with the names of long-forgotten relatives. You search for home in other people. Some of your lovers hold you tight enough to fill, for a moment, the small and shrivelled thing at the centre of your chest. Most of the time, you stay hungry. You drive, and as you drive you scratch your skin from the inside, the same spot always itching.