Prose | Palm Sunday

Words by Charlotte von Fritschen. Image by Niamh Walsh-Vorster.

It’s 10:30am, the time I usually get back from Mass, which is essentially a ritualised hour of spoken words and actions. At once baffling and comforting.

I pull up to the house and sit in the driveway.

I see that the light is on. My lover is home. This is good, but it doesn’t get me out of the car immediately. I zone out, as I often do, and stare at the palm tree next to the garage, hysterical against the wind.

Finally I get out and walk across the lawn.

The weird thing is for the past few months I haven’t been able to get inside the house the usual way. The key wouldn’t fit the hole and when I got another one made it didn’t work either.

This is the way I go about it now:

There are three steps leading up to the front door. I begin pulling them out, one by one, like teeth. I crawl through the hole I’ve made once before. It takes ages, sometimes two weeks, other times, two months. It’s dark and mouldy and I can’t see shit.

As I move down there, darkness gives way a bit, revealing relics of previous dwellings: foundations, window frames. Some of them are reminiscent of our house, others are totally different. One house is in-tact but all the doors and windows bricked up for good. A scratched door still retains patches of bright red paint, gleaming, despite the odds. And, I swear I saw light effulging from an old fireplace.

I crawl and crawl on my elbows, and then look up to see my lover’s face eclipsing the lamp of what must be the living room of our house.

Benediction: Dismantle the doorstep and greet the earth, the dark places, greet everything you are, good and bad. Then get up, get out of the muck, and rejoice in the house you’ve built.

Charlotte von Fritschen is a writer and musician living in Wilderness. She uses writing as a psychic exercise for processing life, clearing the deck, and creating the future. Her work has been featured in Metatron, Slanted, and elsewhere.