I sleep inside your closet. Your old winter coats share stories with me because we have something in common: you haven’t touched us in years. You grew up, and you didn’t need a jacket to stay warm, and you didn’t need a girl to play house with.

I remember the old adage when I wear your shoes. They are six sizes too big and they don’t even have imprints of your toes in them, because they are your dress shoes, your dance shoes, your rain boots. Finally I find that I fit comfortably into the tennis shoes you outgrew eight years ago, but all I can judge from your little toeprints is that you hated show-and-tell because you never had anything to show.

I play the dusty video games in the box you put in here when their console became obsolete. They entertained you for a month, but so far they have entertained me for a year. Did you stow them away because you were done with them, but wanted to keep them around? If so, I will join their cause.

I hide behind a stack of your extra blankets when you open the door and the light floods into my underused eyes. The instant they hear you turn the knob, they stand as tall as they can and throw a sheet around my shoulders, like you used to do with your arm. You’re still taller than them, but you never notice me crouching low to the floor and looking up into your eyes that are always looking at something else.

I hear you singing your favorite songs when everyone else is asleep. Your voice penetrates the closet door, the sound waves only making the slightest disturbances in the painted wood. Every time I see them, I think of strong bass coming from a strong mouth on a strong body that houses a weak heart. Only something so strong trying so hard to be so much stronger could leave wave-letters on wood that spell “HELP ME.”

I want to join you when you sing, just like we used to before it was uncool for our thoughts to be connected at the hand. Your voice penetrates the closet door and it pries my fingers apart when I put my hands to my ears, and it slips right through my eardrums and pushes its way all the way down to my own mouth, where it aches to come back out. At first I keep my lips tightly shut, but you won’t stop singing and soon there is so much of your strong sound inside me that I just can’t hold it all in anymore. My voice explodes out of my mouth and even out of my chest and I can see it shake the door as it passes through, and I wonder if this is the same strength that you sing with. I can hear our voices colliding in your room, and I know you can too, but neither of us stop. We swell to a powerful final chorus and I lose track of whose voice is whose; I only hear one sound in your room and it is a whole new voice, my alto and your bass blending perfectly together and pounding on the door with a strength I could not have imagined.

I count five seconds after the song ends before you put your hand on the doorknob. Your extra blankets rush to cover me, and against my intuition, I obediently sink to the floor. The door swings open and you stick your head in, eyes dashing all about. “Hello?” you call, strong bass putting me in a full-nelson and struggling valiantly to pull me up. “Is anyone in here?” Pause. Your voice is begging mine to answer it, but this time I am determined to stay silent. “Call me crazy, but I think my closet is trying to tell me something. I could swear the door has ‘I’M RIGHT HERE, IF YOU NEED ME’ pressed into it.” You laugh nervously and mutter that you must be going insane.

As you close the door, your eyes find mine for the first time since I started living here.