Remembrance
Each step into the old house is a soft drift into a haze of years, stirring and awakening the sameness, the difference.
Here is the light switch by the open door. The arm is higher now, and misremembers.
There is the once-cluttered kitchen, conjuring forth myriad magic. A savoring of remembered sweetness bites and fades into silence.
Among the ghosts of comfortable chairs, of sheet-covered sofas, are scattered tables and shelves, boxes and books and bric-a-brac, tiny statues and pictures now forgotten beneath a soft and casual fur of dust.
Propped open is this sticking door, never oiled, allowing or disallowing access to those same creaking steps; first this side, then that, stepping over five and forgetting seven, which groans like an unkempt organ. The grand plateau is reached and balance is disrupted — Gulliver on some Lilliputian beach, a clash in the overlay of current tide and pull of memory, discordant: the carpet is soft and colorful where the linoleum was faded; wallpaper once bloomed upon these fierce white walls; new lights dangle and shine brightly.
Stumbling through disjointed hallucinations, tangled in childhood familiarity : Once treasured, these near-empty rooms sit, uncurtained and antiseptic, with their cots and bedding and cheap, discount furniture. A transparent army of tin soldiers glimmers in a beam…