The Bagging #3
It was not easy, and more tears were shed than ever needed to be, but we all knew we were doing the right thing. At least, that was how it felt, and the feeling had to be honored. It was what kept us alive.
We drifted apart for a while after that, though drifted makes it sound gentler than it was.
It was more like being pulled loose from one another by invisible hands.
The world outside that house was too vast, and we were so small inside an even smaller place; each of us suddenly aware that love had not saved us from becoming cruel, stupid, frightened people.
Maybe that was what hurt most. Not what Aaron had done, not even what we had helped him become by laughing too long at the wrong things, but the realization that our little family had never been pure enough to survive contact with consequence.
We drank harder than ever before in those last days, as if we could pickle ourselves into permanence.
Jeff kept making promises with his mouth too close to our faces, swearing we would all come back, that none of this meant anything, that every real family had to break once before it learned how to stay together.
Melissa cried without making a sound, which was worse than sobbing.
She sat on the floor with her knees pulled to her chest, watching the rest of us through her hair, and every now and then she would smile at something nobody had said.
Aaron remained calm. That was the ugliest part.
He looked almost relieved, as if the house had finally begun speaking a language he understood.
The promise was sealed in blood because we were young enough to believe blood made things honest. The remaining razors served their purpose well.
We passed one around in the orange light of the living room, cutting shallow lines into our palms, pressing our hands together one by one, making a wet little church out of pain and Thunderbird and cigarette smoke.
Jeff laughed while he bled. Melissa kissed the cut in her own hand before touching it to mine.
Aaron watched the blood bead and run with an expression I mistook for reverence.
We swore we would eventually return to the same place.
Not just the house, but the feeling of it: the dirty blankets, the stolen meals, the stupid cruelty, the love that had nowhere clean to go.
Even then, I think some part of me knew we were lying.
There are promises people make because they believe them, and promises people make because the alternative is to admit that something has already ended. Ours was the second kind.
Blood and tears, just like in the song. We sang that line later, badly and too loud, with our arms around one another, pretending it was funny.
But there was nothing funny in it. Not really.
It was a hymn for people like us, people who had mistaken damage for depth and hunger for devotion, people who could not tell the difference between being bound together and being trapped.
The next morning, without ceremony, we took whatever little each of us had and went our separate ways.
There were no great speeches, no final embraces worthy of memory, no dramatic last look at the house that had held us together and ruined us in equal measure.
We moved through the rooms quietly, stepping over bottles, dirty clothes, cigarette ash, and all the other evidence of what we had mistaken for a life.
Jeff kept saying he would see us soon. Melissa said nothing.
Aaron stood in the doorway for a while with his bag over one shoulder, watching the rest of us as if we were not leaving but being sorted.
I tried not to look where any of them went, especially Melissa.
I knew that if I watched her too long, if I saw her turn left or right, if I learned which direction had swallowed her, I would follow.
So I kept my eyes low and my mouth shut, biting the inside of my lip until I tasted blood, and walked toward the first corner I could find.
Behind me, someone laughed once. I still don’t know who it was.
By the time I reached the end of the block, the house was gone from sight, and with it the only family I had ever chosen badly enough to love.
For a while, I tried to imagine that leaving meant becoming someone else.
I slept on borrowed couches, in back rooms that smelled of bleach, cheap beer, and wet carpet, beside people whose names I forgot as soon as morning came.
Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night and think I heard Jeff laughing in the next room, or Melissa moving barefoot across linoleum, or Aaron muttering over some candlelit scrap of paper.
But it was never them. It was only the world, rearranged into poorer imitations.
Everywhere I went felt thinner than that house, less real somehow, as if all the life had already happened elsewhere and I had arrived too late.
So I was the first one back. Hell, in a way, I never really left.
That was what it felt like, at least. The world outside had not opened for me after I walked away from the house.
It had only widened, and there is a special kind of terror in discovering that wide places can feel smaller than rooms. Voices came from faces I could not attach myself to.
Every bed I slept in felt borrowed from someone who had died there before I arrived.
I needed quiet, some breathing room, but the world had too much air in it, and none of it seemed meant for my lungs.
I don’t know whether the others felt the same pull, but I have never believed we found our way back by accident.
Not really. People like us do not return to places because they make sense.
We return because something in the walls has kept our shape.
Because every other room rejects us. Because the past, once it has fed on enough of you, learns how to call you by name.
Jeff came back first after me, grinning like he had beaten the road in a fistfight.
He said nothing about where he had been, only dropped a bottle on the table and asked if the house had missed him.
I told him it had not. He said that was good, because missing was for people with options.
Then he laughed, and for a moment the place seemed to remember him.
The floorboards creaked under his boots.
The windows held the sound. Even the dust looked disturbed in a familiar way.
Melissa arrived after him. Of course she did.
She slunk back only once Jeff was there, though I don’t think it was him she was following.
Not really. She stood in the doorway with her bag in one hand, thinner than before, her hair cut badly at the shoulders, her eyes bright and tired.
She said she had nowhere else to go, then immediately looked ashamed for having said something so close to the truth.
None of us told her the truth was welcome there.
We had never known how to be kind without making it ugly.
And Aaron dragged himself in last, near midnight, like he had been chasing ghosts the whole time and had finally learned they were chasing him back.
He carried almost nothing. No clothes, no books, no practical proof that he had existed anywhere else.
Just a paper sack folded under one arm and a look on his face that made the house seem suddenly awake.
“It’s coming along, huh?” he muttered from the doorway.
No one asked what he meant. Maybe because we were tired. Maybe because the house had gone so quiet around him that asking felt like knocking on the wrong door.
We were surprised to see him, but it was clear that something was seriously off with him.
This time it was real. Yet, somehow, everything fell back into place as if no one had ever stepped beyond the doorway.
That night, I kissed Melissa, and kissed Jeff too.
Their lips were dry from cigarettes and Thunderbird.
I think I even wanted Aaron, but he wasn’t interested.
He sat alone again, lost in thought. At least, it looked like he was thinking.
We weren’t contemplating about Bagging – not the three of us. But it was October, yet again.
“I’ve got an idea,” Aaron said then.
We broke apart, our lips still tingling, and stared at him.
“What if we stuffed a ghost in the bag?” he asked.
We laughed like fools. We weren’t that high, not really – but it was still absurdly hilarious. And, honestly, none of it made any sense.
He didn’t seem to find it funny.
“How would you even do that?” Jeff asked, lighting a joint.
“I need a volunteer,” Aaron said.
“I’ll do it,” Melissa offered, yawning.
I knew, even before she opened her mouth, that nothing good could come from it.
Maybe not in words, not in any clean thought I could have explained to Jeff or even to myself, but I knew it in the body.
In the tightness behind my ribs. In the way the candlelight seemed to press against the walls instead of brightening them.
In the way Aaron’s voice had changed since coming back to us, not deeper or louder, but emptier.
Our return to the house had been good at first, or at least it had felt good in the ruined way familiar pain can feel like comfort.
For a little while, we were all in the same room again.
Jeff was laughing. Melissa was breathing beside me.
The floor knew our weight. The walls held our smoke.
Even the filth seemed tender, because it was ours.
I think that is how traps work on people like us.
They do not open with teeth. They open with memory.