Dear House on Polk Street,

You were never just walls and windows, were you? You were grief painted into corners, memories echoing off floorboards, silence so loud it pierced through every breath I tried to take.
You were at my parents’ home first. Their voices lived in your walls. Their touch was in the creak of every stair, in the smell of the closets, in the way the sun came through the windows just like it used to when I was little. When they left, both of them, you became something else.
A cage.
You held me, yes, but you also trapped me. I walked room to room trying to find pieces of them, trying to remember the warmth, the laughter, the safe parts. But every time I tried to land in a memory, it slipped away and left me with something darker: the fights, the illnesses, the final days, the quiet that came after death moved in and refused to leave.
I slept in different rooms because I couldn’t bear to stay in just one. I was chasing ghosts and running from them at the same time. I’d lie in my childhood bed and ache. I’d move to the couch and stare at the ceiling until the sun came up. I tried to relive something, anything good, but all I could feel was the weight of everything I lost.
Then one day, I started therapy. In you.
It wasn’t planned. Virtual sessions were the only way I could get help without having to leave the place I feared and clung to all at once. I’d sit in front of a screen, sometimes barely able to speak. Sometimes sobbing. Sometimes numb. But the more I spoke the more I let go, the more something shifted in you. And in me.
You started to become the one place I could be real.
I screamed inside of you. I cried so hard my chest would ache for hours. I whispered things I had never said out loud: regrets, secrets, shame, grief. You never once turned away from me. You held me through every single unraveling.
And in that unraveling, something strange happened.
You started to change.
Not just emotionally but physically too. One day I looked at you and realized you didn’t feel like theirs anymore. You didn’t feel haunted. You felt ready. Ready to become something new.
So, I got to work. Slowly. Carefully. With shaky hands and hope I didn’t fully believe in yet. I painted your walls. Tore down others. Rearranged. Rebuilt. Not just your layout but my own life. I made you mine.
Each change was more than aesthetic. It was a ritual, a reclamation. I wasn’t just making you beautiful, I was healing. Every coat of paint, every new fixture, every corner I cleaned or reimagined was part of grieving and growing and finally living.
You saw me go from surviving to something close to thriving.
You saw me cry, not just from pain but from joy. On days I never thought I’d see. You became my sanctuary, not because you were quiet, but because you were honest. You let me be messy, raw, broken. You held space for me to break down and rebuild.
Now, I walk through your halls, and I don’t feel that same grief dragging behind me. I feel warmth. Light. Presence. I don’t avoid the rooms anymore. I sit in them. I drink coffee where my mother once folded clothes. I write where my father once watched TV. They’re still here in the way my peace echoes now where sorrow once lived.
You are no longer just the house I inherited.
You are no longer just the place my parents left behind.
You are mine.
You’re where I became someone new. Where I stitched together pieces of myself that I thought I’d lost forever. Where I found the strength to keep going. Where I learned that healing isn’t a destination, it’s a homecoming.
My homecoming.
And sometimes, I still cry. But not because I’m lost or broken. I cry because I feel it all so deeply now the beauty, the resilience, the love I never thought I’d feel again.
You are my soft place to land. My reminder that pain doesn’t last forever, not if we face it, not if we do the work, not if we let ourselves transform in the spaces we once feared.
Thank you for not giving up on me.
Thank you for becoming mine.

Your late owner’s daughter,
Melissa