Homesickness - a reading (on YouTube)
Our room is haunted.
The other guest room is clean and pure, as innocent as the children's silhouettes hanging in the sunshine above one of the chaste twin beds.
Ours is cluttered and crowded by the memory of choices entangled in a double bed, his and theirs, neither in her favor. His in the actions that wounded her that night. Theirs in the inaction that stanched neither tears nor blood. His choice remains incomprehensible, the inviable infant offspring of an inviolable, ancient instinct. Theirs was simple and pragmatic. When faced with a sufficiently severe crisis, every tree cuts off its least productive branch.
So I lie awake at night, detached and melancholy as a ghost, anchored but no longer fully present in this world, yet unable to move on to any punishment or reward. The faded shade of Christmas past before she revealed her secret, before my vision of becoming a part of someone else's family was completely torn apart. I have joined a divided clan that will never be reunited.
Down the road, trapped behind a graveyard wall, two maple seedlings seek nourishment from the rotting stump of an ancient ancestor, feeding off its memories as they trace the remnants of its roots, hoping one day to grow beyond them and dig their way to clean earth below.
© 2010 Edward P. Morgan III
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ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
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The years change very little of how I feel. It's not so much about the original incident now, as it is about the choices people made in the years since.