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Back to the room
Back in the parental home for one night, before visiting grandparents tomorrow. Every time I come back here, something else has changed -- there's a patio where the scrubby tree and the anomalous fritillary were; the old fire has been replaced with a neat black stove; the TV is on a modern glass corner-table instead of strange 80s built-in units; there's a shiny double bed in what was my room -- and still is my room, in parts, but with fewer and fewer of my things each time I come and go. And every time I come back, I'm a little bit different, too; thinking different things, having been to different places, knowing things I didn't know before. (Knowing things I wish I'd known then; knowing things I wish I didn't know now.) Each time I walk in and out of this place I wear away the carpet a little bit more, and one day they'll get a new carpet, but by the time it has to go, you're ready to see the back of it. Bit by bit the cells of my body will die and be replaced, leaving the dust of dead skin in a layer throughout the house; and bit by bit I'll wear the house away, taking things and leaving things, ebb and flow, flotsam and jetsam, wearing it all away like the water wears the stone.
Posted via LiveJournal.app.
We need a better word than mere 'forgetting'
I did it to myself: I took the posters down, took away the things I valued and felt emotional attachments to; crossed the threshold when I left for Oxford and decided that, whatever happened and whenever I returned, this is a place that I have left and all that I retain of it is in this suitcase.
And so it was. Nine weeks later I came back, my first term over, knowing that the boy who left this dismal Midland city had grown out of it. This town, this poky little terraced house, the old possessions in it, all the things I used to do there; all of them a place that I was forced to stay in - a place I'm from, but never of it.
I came back as a stranger and forever afterwards was greeted in the house as such. Perhaps familiarity had blinded me to something: what if I had always been?
Not home, not me, not ever.
So no, the steady tide of redecoration and replacement of the furniture was never an erosion of my childhood; that house and all the things therein were memories I'd chosen, on that day, to leave behind me as I crossed the threshold. Some things I took with me later; many things I chose to leave and learned, with indifference or mild relief, that they had been disposed of.
Whatever junk was in it when my mother died, and my sister deemed to be my property, is packed in boxes that remain unopened two years since they came to me. They are not my youth, they are archaeology, the artifacts of strangers; whatever memories they hold, they are not me and they are most certainly not the mementoes of my youth - I never had one or, at least, whatever it is we hope to do in those long years was taken from me.
It's only now, in five brief years, that a slender thread of friendship strengthened and became the warm and beautifully human fabric that I find myself expanding into, growing up into, a man whose friends and lovers never saw that house and anything of me that happened in it, and surely never will.
I think of it as cleaning rather than removal.
I Remember, I Remember
Re: We need a better word than mere 'forgetting'
Re: We need a better word than mere 'forgetting'
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