A Paranoid Exaggeration.

People say that a home should be where you feel safe, a place to rest and relax, a place that shelters your thoughts and shelves the worries of tomorrow. In a home, you should feel like you can open up, be yourself, and let other people in. Then, in that case, my home is more like a psycho ward than a place for a family. Twitchy and nervous, I sit on the couch near the window and listen for shouts and conversations outside. Conversations that a little bit of privacy, if it were to be granted, would have blocked from my ears. I sit in my room, and I hear thumps and booms from the walls around me, like an angered beast is rampaging all around me in circles. This beast does not drag his feet, and I never know where the next will fall, each time making me jump. I try to rest, laying in my sisters bed, and I can not. After hours of battling myself, rolling and twisting with the blanket snaking more and more tightly around me, I am just about to fall asleep. But then I hear the worst thing in the world, my enemy in an invisible form, Distraction. He pulls my mind out from the sewer of sleep and throws it back down into the center of my brain. It takes me a moment, but I finally figure out what snagged my attention like a fish, and this annoys me even more. Bed springs. Loud, obnoxious, squealing bed springs. It is as if they planned this, their high-pitched moaning warping into giggles as they darted through the air and slapped me in the face. It was like I was a pan on a stove and this was my fire, irritating me until I was red-hot. The bed springs ceased their relentless giggling. Then they began again. They stopped. Then they began again. I heard floor-boards creak and water run, and after that, I fell asleep, exhausted and agitated. In this building, I know better than to step outside and have the audacity to believe nobody is watching. You just do not do it. They lurk behind their windows, weaved into their curtains. They watch; You, themselves, and each other. Nothing you do goes unseen, inside the building or out, and if you try to run, they will find you. Even if you rest inside, they greedily watch, their appetite only growing. You take a breath, and the imp behind the wall marks it down on his tally-chart. You mistake this for the clock, and he clutches his clip-board with one clawed hand and grins, satisfied that you have not caught on to their little game.