To squeak open that door again, I pull back. It’s cool, and iron routed in a bow-like curvature—too impressive, too stately for a lowly guest like myself. I turn my face, looking away, but no other body part betrays me. I need a moment—10–20 beats of my heart—to settle into the top step, into the space between then and what would be. Once I’ve collected breath and body, I swing the door open with a force that sends the opposing side splintering into the interior’s drywall.
I hold back a “Honey, I’m home.” The clown-like red lipstick smeared at the corner of my left lip, a lightened shadow of its initial application, shows like dust on the blanketed piano and matchstick, splintered chair. The withheld vocalization is not because no one would hear, but because, for me, in my own head, I already hear its echoing, its pronouncement to no one.
The house, a relic of the 1710s, shrieks at the door’s obliteration, its blissful ignorance incinerated like a body in a crematorium.
They’ll worry about me, she thought, stepping across a threshold long stripped of its fresh coat of paint. The single fissures, like cracks in clay after a far-too-wet-then-dry spell, turn to dust at the pressure of her. Her thought, more a pronouncement than worry, becomes the next thought pinging her mind. She doesn’t know how she’d arrived in this place, at that door, and in the house she’d unconsciously stored in the brain’s recesses of time and space.
To understand—let’s leave that for the scientists. As for her, she took in the Late Baroque style: the interlaced golds and whites, the geometric spell-binding border, and the center which, as she gazed, became a reflective mirror-like scene she stepped into as if in a dream.
He was there—or rather, that which he invoked in her. A time in her twenties, decades ago. The feeling of forever, all the way to the deathbed of her own. She was impulse alone, walking and falling into them like an eroding lava pit. The strength of her desire overpowered one hundred gladiators, and her broken heart denied the same. To deny her meant death, regret—therefore no one did. In the strokes of a young artist’s brush, she saw the professed love in spells her heart cast. A witch in herself, she toiled and schemed, and into the delusion of reality she fell like a well-blown, glossy pink and blue bubble.
How many times had she come to this very place, to this very spot, to stare up and into this scene? A thousand, maybe more. To do it this time, after the grays and whites of age had filled her head, and mold-like brown spots diseased her hands, she felt a strain—the crack of a bone in her neck—as she looked down. To rest from the spells and the dreams. For she was an old lady no longer with the six feet below untouchable. It was this awareness of time’s hand on her shoulder that caused her to abruptly turn. The sharp pain in her hip objected to the movement, as did the house’s floorboard just the same. Through the still-open door, she pulled herself, through the aches and the cracks, and it was Time, with its strong arm around her shoulder, that she trusted—and who set her finally free.
Going On 40 