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From a novella I'm trying to fix, but most of it rather sucks
January 26, 2010
On Our First Night In The House
On our first night in the house we lay holding hands on the lounge room floor, with what little furniture we'd found or carried with us strategically placed around the room. There was an old, sagging couch, cracked plastic chairs, and lawn furniture faded and brittle from too long in the sun. All of it draped in a network of frayed blankets and sheets that we'd somehow accumulated over the years. As we set the last pillow in place, you said it was a fortress, but in the summer night's breeze I saw the sheets above us lift and ripple like sails. We fell asleep holding hands and whispering promises we'd never quite follow through on, and, in the morning when I awoke to find you gone I called your name with a child-like desperation. You crawled back under the tangle of furniture and blankets and passed me an instant coffee, black and sugarless in a paper cup, and lying there in that moment, you in your fortress and me on my sailing ship, we both realised somehow that we'd managed to escape. We were happy then without needing to tell ourselves so; for the first time we'd stopped running and we started seeing our futures unfold before us like a map on to which we began charting our course, devising our strategy, no longer dancing and twisting like whirlwinds, as we were now commanders and captains, split in perspectives we would never learn to reconcile, but joined in a shared call to arms. And with our charts and plans, and summer in hand, we set to work strengthening our battlements and building an armada.
On Our Last Night In The House
On our last night in the house I opened a kitchen drawer out of habit. Its contents had long been packed away, stuffed into the boxes that lined our walls. I half thought of searching through them, but they were now your things, and the noise might bring you from your room. I pictured you in there, bed frame disassembled against the wall, metal painted black, one side bowing out from where we'd somehow broken it, or perhaps it had always been broken, I no longer remembered. There'd be a pile of dusty red bricks, which we had found in the garden, sitting in the corner of your room. We'd used them to prop up the frame, to even it out, until you stubbed your toes for the hundredth time and decided it wasn't worth it, decided just to adjust and learn to sleep with a crooked back. I saw you, sitting there in the darkness, listening to your music because the phone line had been out for days and the power would go soon and anyway there was nothing else to clean or say or do. Sleep would not come to you again and you realised this; the mattress on the floor behind you lay as naked as it had in the beginning, the old sheets and blankets folded neatly away inside more waxy cardboard boxes we'd once salvaged from a supermarket dumpster. I pictured you sitting there as I looked at your door, wanting to open it, wanting to fall into the mattress and tell you about the dreams, dreams of a missing child and a house that came alive, of windows that would heal over and rooms that would shift and change and disappear, rearranging themselves into something different entirely. But already the dreams were leaving me, and their meanings too, the truth of it all intangible to the waking world. I wanted to say that I was sorry, but did not mean it, could not mean it, because the things we had been running from were there in the rooms with us, they hung in the air and nested in drawers and crawled behind cupboards and wardrobes, hidden in the places that we'd never think or choose to look.
On our last night in the house I closed the drawer and left the room and would not dream.