I haven’t been home in… longer than I can remember. Two years? Three? My mother calls, of course she does. "When are you coming?" she says, voice like a siren, pulling me back to the rocks. I always have an excuse. Always. Grad school, you know. Papers, deadlines, the usual song and dance. It’s a good excuse, a solid one, but it’s a lie. The truth is… I can’t face it. Not yet. His room. It’s still there, you see. A museum, my mother calls it, and she means it like it’s a good thing. A shrine. He never cleaned it, not really. Trophies on the dresser, a dusty parade of plastic figures, all the evidence of a childhood lived loud and bright. Little league, school plays, science fairs. And under it all, under the dust and the faded glory, the smell. Oh, God, the smell. A faint ghost of boy sweat and stale pizza and something vaguely sweet, like old candy wrappers. I swear I can still smell it through the phone when she talks about it. Like a time capsule of unwashed socks and forgotten dreams. It chokes me, just thinking about it. I see her face when she talks about him, about his room. Her eyes get that faraway look, like she’s seeing a photograph that only she can develop. And me… I just nod. I say "Uh-huh, Mom." Because what else can I say? That I’m still here, still working, still scraping by, still paying the bills from my little studio apartment that smells faintly of ramen and cheap coffee. Still living, yes. But sometimes I wonder if I’m really just… haunting. And that room, that untouched, perfect, stinking room… it’s a monument to everything I’m not. Everything I never was. And every time she asks when I’m coming home, I just want to laugh. A big, ugly, teary laugh. Because how can I go back to that? How can I step into that picture and not just… disappear?