Empty house
No cats quest for the opening front door. The real mail diminishes every day, but the ad mail continues, wilfully blind. The lid of the mailbox bangs down, hollow.
Upstairs, sun spills across the empty hardwood floors, the blinds hoisted high and revealing, nothing coy here, the blunt sales pitch of “look what I’ve got.”
Windows stare their thousand-yard stares and you bend down to pick up something — a button, small and round and punched through four times for thread, and you can conceive of nothing, absolutely nothing, that it belonged to, but somewhere, you know there are hanging, broken threads. Familiar becomes a stranger.
In the basement, where the bookshelf was, there are still indentations in the carpet. It’s somehow revealing: is there a way, you think, to rub those dents away, to hide the evidence of lives comfortably lived? You’ve no doubt left that telltale of DNA, if anyone were looking — a hair here, a scrape or scrap of fugitive skin. They could find it, the crime scene investigators could, and still know nothing more than what’s already obvious: that you lived here.
But perhaps there’s something else, something more. Your hand travels the wall backwards, knuckles out, and still the Morse of old dents and plaster is familiar. You know what happened here, dot-dot, and there as well — dash. The faucets installed and craning over the kitchen sink, the drain repaired, your awkward wrench marks still there on the pipes crowded under the counter.
All of it still there; even though the furniture’s gone, you can bring it all up in your memory — set the table for five, four, three, two, vacuum the stairs, pull the wrong screwdriver from the tool drawer and then the right one, take remembered clothes from closets that are now merely bare racks.
It would be nice to believe that houses aged like trees, that every year, every love, every loss lived on in there somewhere like an annual ring that you could find by simple cross-section: the lean years, the noisy years, the sharp hard corners that mark every life.
It’s probably better to move more frequently, at least so the roots don’t set into you so deeply. I can only imagine what it must be like for someone who is forced to move after an entire life in one place.
Even empty, it is so familiar, and yet so hauntingly altered. Brush through the empty halls and you can’t help but feel that you’ve managed to become something like a ghost yourself, ethereal and merely passing, your marks made and painted over and quickly forgotten.
The furnace awakens, grumbles, and the radiators sing. And that noise, that noise that used to startle and awaken, is instead remarkably comforting. Come back in 10 years, come back in 20, and if that furnace is still here and carolling its basso profundo, you can’t help but believe you will be, too — like dust, like memory, like a funneled spiderweb hidden and poised behind an electrical plug plate — still caught fast in this house and its story.