20. House is Awake
Buildings! 50 years old (more or less) wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have always been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like car brought back from servicing or people brought back from drowning, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighbourhood, they can build their own trees and even read and write English, they are old hands at common place mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a black yellow sky, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way.
Buildings!
A complaint was registered on old, old, old, very old Monday about how Building should be called Leavings. But like all things with a point this was left hanging a mango tree too. Building are building nothing once people leave. Leaving is so continuous. Some say I have just woken up to living this way. Maybe. I am relying heavily on people.
House woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. It woke at intervals until, that June when Leo went down the gate, even intervals of those walking tripped its ploy against Mango tree, its judicious watch over leaves. I was more often awake than not.
I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far awake I would be awake continuously and never slip back and never be free of myself again.
p.s. Inspired from the preface of Coming of Age edited by Bruce Emra, which had intelligent and moving lines from Annie Dillard.
