After years of being away, home feels like bed and breakfast. Only the proprietors are the aged versions of myself: the male and female sides divorced, fleshed out, ambulatory on the creaking floor. My old room had been kept as it was, drowning in the pale browns that scatter from the wood paneling. The riffraff papers and the toppled orangeade bottles have been untouched since I abandoned them abruptly. There is everything quaint and homely about the reddening trees outside. These frozen flares are fractals but also the papery debris of age. Where is the girl I used to desire from the third floor window? Where are the holes I dug and covered in duff, the pranks I played on ghosts and boredom? I still see the poplars and the bricked pond. There is the odd neighbor who keeps a flood light through the black hours. In the brown house at the corner lives the professor of philosophy whose lust for soft cheeses is noisome and legendary. But nothing materializes except the humming of leaf work and the cold.
germanicus2 · Sat Nov 01, 2008 @ 09:00pm · 1 Comments
