What No One Wants.

Ever since I can remember, there was a hole in my bedroom wall.

I never knew how it got there. A doorknob. An angry foot. Some accident that happened before I was old enough to ask.

The cause didn't matter.

It was mine.

My child fingers, without the dexterity and assuredness of adulthood, grasped and picked around the powdery edges as little pieces, bits, and flecks pried off. Chips of wall that I could place in my mouth, cough into my hand, and drop into the hole, which, to me, in that moment, was an infinite abyss.

What some would view as immature destruction, curiosity, the stupidity of youth, became something else entirely.

The hole was a refuge for all those parts of me that couldn't fit in the room, or the house, or this world anymore.

The Matchbox car my mother said she would throw away if she stepped on it again fit through the hole with ease. No clank at the bottom, and I was assured it was safe. Toenails I peeled off until my foot bled. Notes written on receipts. Lists of future selves. Wishes folded into tiny squares. For a decade, I fed the endlessly, insatiably hungry hole all those parts of me no one wanted.

And it never said no.

It only asked for more.

Nothing I fed it was too ugly, too embarrassing, too strange. The hole accepted everything.

I was never too much there.

Never unwanted.

Even the nastiest, most disgusting, unrelenting little pieces of me were welcome. Wads of chewed-up gum. Mean thoughts. Petty jealousies. Secret hopes. Each time, I felt the tightness in my chest, the electric burn on my cheeks, lessen ever so slightly, relieved that I had secured these parts of myself in a place no one would find.

In this manner, I was able to live, continue to live, as whole as I had hoped. Everything about me no one wanted was sequestered in the depths of the wall, leaving only the most pristine and acceptable version of myself for the public to see.

I could straddle two worlds: the one in which I could be what everyone wanted, and the one in which all the parts I liked were hidden in the dark of whatever lay within the layers of Sheetrock.

A portal for me and me alone.

Until one day, my parents announced the sale of the house.

Oh, how they suddenly busied themselves with repairs, and the hole in my wall—my hole—became a topic of conversation for the first time in my short life. I accompanied them all the way to the store for the repair kit, stirred the mixture with water, watched as my father laid strips of plaster-soaked mesh over the hole.

The disappointment that I no longer had my safe space, that my hole was closed off, was met with a strange comfort.

It was permanently safe now.

I didn't even cry when we moved or when the house was sold. But I did wonder if the darkest spirit of myself had somehow leached into the home, could be felt in the air, as though the particles of me vibrated through the walls.

Was I haunting them now?

Did they feel me in the wallpaper?

Did they wonder why a room suddenly felt crowded?

Did they lie awake at night with the sense that something unfinished still lived inside the walls?

But as I grew and moved from place to place, home to home, as parents died and that house remained—a monument built upon all I had tried to salvage of my unlovable self—I came to a starker realization.

I saw these things I had tried to hide in the gaping, welcoming hole renewed within myself, as if I had never dropped them into the eternal abyss at all. As if these were simply parts of me, the way weeds are pulled and return again the next day.

And I tried to pry and cut and sever them. Tried to return to the sweet solitude of the hole, to straddle two worlds.

But in the end, all I had was me—all the parts, the disgusting bits and the few acceptable pieces, which seemed dimmer each day. The hole had taken nothing. Even my toenails grew back.

The wall had healed.

I hadn't.