Gray

It’s late Winter, and the breeze outside is beginning to taste like Spring. But the air in this house is stagnant and stale, heavy with the great burden of memory.

Everything inside has been tinted the hazy gray of late night cigarettes, slowly and constantly burned out of equal parts habit and distraction, hoping against hope to find peace of mind in old familiarity. The gray permeates everything within; every thought of the laughter that this place once held is now tinged with the bitter taste of tragic inevitability.

What taints this air will never be removed, the familiar ghosts walking these halls never to face exorcism. They are the new tenants, secured here by the unalienable squatters rights forever assigned to those most melancholy of memories. Their lease here is one that defies contention. And this, I accept. The spirits of those now-gray memories can have this place. And maybe someday I’ll rejoin them, reunited in that hazy gray of cigarette-stained memory.