windows
My lids get heavier with a seven year old haze. I find it difficult to stay awake to listen to some new story, to read a new page or to follow a new line. It’s difficult to reckon with late hours, with Clifford memories of a child dying of cancer or a failing heart.
Shadows moving across the house are no more trespassers. They are often a five feet two or even a four eleven. They seem to lurk all around the house with a defined character: here to haunt, here to chase, here to die. The window created out of a slated wall in his room hasn’t changed much. The light barely comes in; the ventilation has hardly improved; and I for one, don’t have the heart to change the starry sky. Every year I play around with that space thinking one change would steer me away from my nightmare. Every year I think that that little hundred and fifty odd square feet will somehow wake me up to a more positioned life.
But it really hasn’t happened.
The room has remained the way it was seven years ago. The ceiling still wears the blue. The walls still have his old shelves hosting my books along with his. The bathroom still has the silly old Garfield tiles that I made when he was two. The silly dressing room still is the same old store. The only difference has been the windows. Last year I carved one out of a blocked wall, this year another. Since, windows don’t wash away sediments of loss, maybe I should plan on changing the floor next fall.
