The apartment had the same old smell to it when I turned the door handle and walked in. The windows were clouded with dust, the furniture inside seemed happy to see me. The walls holding the secrets of the time I was here, happy, sad, angry excited even suicidal. It had seen and heard too much. I hadn’t returned in 15 years, yet the floors creaked the same. The balcony drew me first, the roses were still there, not the tender blush-pink blossoms of my childhood but wild, overgrown things that almost seemed alive. Their vines coiled along the balcony