Your haunted house
Your haunted house doesn't understand metaphors, doesn't understand sarcasm. Creaks and rattles handles trying to inquire why you would speak around your point instead of going across, why you keep constructing puzzles out of words. You try to explain to it how half your words are more like the curlicues on the staircase raining than the beams: decoration built into function to the point where it's hard to tell the two apart. There was a time when that frustrated you, too, but you were small and grownups told you they knew better and you believed them and followed suit.
You do not tell your house you know better.
Your haunted house eats chips and instant noodles and nothing else, no missing mice, no unfortunate birds found half-digested in the chimney tract. Once you fed it cat food because your friend said that would be good for it and it shook itself inside out, vomited out the trash bins and out the drain in the kitchen and out the fireplace, every orifice of the house shaking with disgust. You make sure to keep chips in every room, now.
Your haunted house wants so badly to be a home. Notices your patterns, the waxing and waning of your moods. Your haunted house rattles the fridge doors if you skip breakfast, keeps itself as warm or as cool as it can. Keeps everything in its place, fussing in the kitchen, Disney cartoon scene of flour and milk and butter flying from their places to make a cake played backwards.
Your haunted house loves you but almost none of your relatives, except for aunt Josephine who goes by Joe and hasn't visited in three years even though she sends the most ridiculous postcards from places you only see in movies or in calendar pictures. Your haunted house can't stand Christmas dinners, whines during cookouts with all of its halls, hates fireworks. Once when your neighbors got too loud during the fourth of July it opened a medieval moat between itself and the world, fences raised in hackles. You put on The Golden Girls, let little old ladies talk it out of constructing a bunker in its basement.
Your haunted house is afraid it is too much: most of its tenants thought so, the price dropping so low you managed to afford it straight out of college, back when you were checking the market just in case while deciding between crashing at your friend's place for a few more weeks or moving back in with your parents. It pretended to be an ordinary house, for a time. Stifled its shudder when you played music too loud, moved the floorboards under the clothes you threw on the bedroom floor again again like tongue over something stuck between teeth, all the way up until it didn't. Until it put the clothes, folded, on your chair and waited for you to explode and you didn't, not in the habit of biting helping hands even if they aren't hands at all. Start the slow, shuffling dance of building trust, although of course your house wouldn't call it that: houses don't dance, that would be far too risky for everyone inside and around. It'd simply say you came to be friends.
You sometimes wonder if there's some way to hug a house – if it would like hugs. Instead you make sure its floors are squeaky clean and all the rugs and couch blankets and ornaments are the right textures (no scratchy wool, no leather, as much velvet as you can get your hands on), let old shows about people all living in one place where the place is as much of a character as anyone else play on repeat on the old TV in the living room while you sit there drawing or sculpting or drifting into sleep. The house opens and closes the doors, creaks the floorboards in content cacophony.
Your haunted house loves being lived in and you come to love that it's alive.