A door opens onto a wall. A window is trapped behind another.

I visit the mystery house with my college boyfriend for an anniversary, but really, I am trying to uncover how I became a girl who accepts being torn down and rebuilt like this house. I am looking to solve the riddle where one and one do not make two but rather one is greater than the other, my world easily absorbed by a boy who says he loves me but does not want me to love anything else. Even myself.

I have been to the Winchester Mystery House before, on a high school trip, shrouded in another life. Back then, we wandered the 160 rooms, learned about the 10,000 windows and 2,000 doors, and though most laughed at a widowed woman so mad she devoted her life to building a labyrinth around herself, already I understood trying to create something that would keep you unreachable and free.

My high school friends and I kept each other close as lovers, whispered secret devotions and smoothed our hands over one another’s bodies to tend to what haunted us. There was the friend who was secretly dating a teacher, sneaking into his room on nights he was supposedly our chaperone. He knew we knew, and during the day he scolded us for giggling or straying off the path. There was the friend who gave herself to any boy who would have her because her father said she was conceived to replace a dead sister. There was the friend who threw up after every meal. The friend who cut herself to feel. The friend who hated herself because she hated a girl loving a girl.

How I loved them, these girls. We grew up playing doctor, trying to heal hurts no one would see or believe, and with my oversized dollhouse, taking turns shimmying our growing bodies out the front door as if trying to escape. But after graduation, we saw each other rarely, as memories, as ghosts on the Internet. We tried to flee, but mostly we moved our hurts somewhere else as we built new homes.

I have tried to build a home with my college boyfriend. He says the woman who built the mystery house must be haunted. He says the same about me, when I have feelings he does not understand, mostly unhappy ones about our relationship, or when I do not want to do whatever he desires like shoot guns or play video games or listen to him incorrectly correct me. Or mend a fight that he started by giving him my body.

He does not like my body anyway, monitors what I eat by tracking calories on a sheet of paper he keeps in his pocket or removing my plate from in front of me during a meal. One Valentine’s Day, he buys me a chocolate cake in the shape of a heart and permits me one piece before throwing the rest away. As the years add up, pounds subtract on the scale and people ask me where I’ve vanished.

At its most expansive, the mystery house had hundreds more rooms. Now many are lost, crumbled, walled off, or inaccessible. I imagine them as holes on the inside, wounds that will never be healed because they cannot be reached.

I wander towards another of the six kitchens but my boyfriend reaches for my hand to pull me back in his direction. The tour guide talks about legends, stories about spirits and superstitions. Most are made up, a convenient way for others to understand a difficult woman.

But it is no mystery to me why a woman would want to wall herself in, would build something only to watch it fail and be forced to begin again.

It will be many years before I leave him in order to build something of my own.

For now, we take the stairs. He climbs the conventional ones, moves easily to another floor. I prefer to take the ones where you climb and climb, convinced you might be mad, might be hovering between life and death, claustrophobic in the tiny corridor, the walls closing in, all that time and effort only to move a few feet, to go nowhere.
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Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press) and three poetry chapbooks. Nerve, a craft book on unlearning the ableist workshop and developing a disabled writing practice, is forthcoming with Sundress Publications. Abbreviate, a short collection of flash nonfiction, is forthcoming with Harbor Editions. She is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University.

Artwork by Char Gardner