I know how it is.

I know how it is, it's late at night and you're at your parents, sleeping in your old bed, the room that was yours and that your mother always intended to make into a craft room of some sort, she said so when you left for college, but then you were coming back, summers, working at the Baskin Robbins and staying with them to try to save money. By the time you finally moved somewhere permanent, you left such detritus in your wake that the makeover seemed like too much effort. Anyway your parents sit together most nights, staring at the TV, no time or energy for crafting. So the room remains something like a time capsule, an homage to the person you were when you moved out, the kind of person who still bought posters with inspirational sayings on them and slept in a single bed. And now it's late at night, and you're under the cartoon bedspread (you took the black one you bought as a teen to college with you, where Shannon spilled beer on it and ruined it, so all you have at home is the bedspread you got for your eighth birthday). The noise from the television has stopped, your father snapping off the lights as he climbed the stairs behind your mother, and the only sound is a branch tapping occasionally on the window outside. So just you now, awake in the dark, the tapping branch, the creaks that an old house makes, your thoughts.