A Personal Anecdote

What’s done is done.  The back door of the vehicle is pulled down and hits a stopping point with a loud clashing sound.  The door is locked by someone who displays a prideful persona of experience in traveling along black tar trails, where the exuberant life in nature run alongside and where rubber tires meet.  Bringing one life to another, creating cultures of people, adding and subtracting to the realm of societies across lands, he is about to do this yet again, and he is sitting in front of this house.

The front door closes behind her with a right turn of the lock, and it is the last time that she will ever close herself in the warmth of her own home.  The stairs curl around three walls that give the house stability up two floors and she ascends them to the room on the right.  As she ascends, she realizes this will be her last entrance to a place she has used to escape from daily concerns, paralyzing herself in a different world characterized with a reality that only exists in the form of her dreams.  She looks through a frame – a white frame – that interrupts the wall.  The frame paints a picture in its transparency.  This empty space, a room once characterized by warmth and belonging, solely her own, is now cold.  It is empty.  It is lonely. 

Once she leaves, it will be even more cold, empty and lonely.  Although she can see through this frame, it cannot see through her.  She can occasionally see her reflection through the glare when the sun sets at an exact point in the sky.  It is sunset.  Through the glare she catches a view of a marsh that changes from brown, to green, and back to brown with the seasons.  She has seen it change for many years through this frame, and she has seen the entirety of this town in just that view.  This is the last time she will see this image and turn to see the silhouette of the frame on the opposite wall in a glowing outline.  This is her last look.

“It’s time to go,” a voice calls from below.  She spares one last blink, one last moment for herself.  In that blink time passes, and where she is becomes where she is from.  As she descends down the staircase one last time, balancing herself on these wooden railings, she feels the wood slide through her sweaty hands.  As she stands outside of the door, she hears it lock one last time and the sound is different than the echo she once heard inside.  In doing so, she erects a barrier against her previous life in this town, and her present life becomes her past.  And there, this empty house is left behind for someone else to occupy in this charming town in Beaufort – a town whose marshes change from brown, to green, and back to brown with the seasons.

It took me nine years to build my perfect life, and just one blink to drown it in my past.  I am one who was subtracted from the realm of that beautiful society.  Although the sun has set on those years of my life, it will forever be the background of every town that is painted through the transparency of my bedroom window.