Breathe

She regarded her surroundings with a sense of timelessness. The encapsulating effect of nostalgia shielded her from the pained memories that lay nestled around each corner. She brought her fingers to edge of a window pane and began to trace a lazy perimeter; grinning as dust built around her finger. As a child she could not bear deviations from the immaculate and orderly. The warping nature of time had done away with those behaviors, along with the mind behind it. She had also adored her name. It felt ‘red’ to her with an uncanny certainty notorious to a child’s mind. A mind that lacked the dismissal of ‘frivolous’ thought. She found her name as an insufficient label presently. If names are supposed to be a sort of apt marker, shouldn't they change as we most certainly do? What a fun mess that would bring. . . Any swell of change, or petty drama, or even season would yield a new label. Ridiculous. It was just a passing notion however; frivolous, and it left her.

The winding staircase led her up to an empty center room. She stepped as to not disturb the fragile, comforting familiarity that shrouded them. This thin veil supplemented by time was all that preserved her composure. It mislead as personal strength, but she knew the memories that lined her every step could easily hollow the ground beneath her. Her carefulness was in vain though, forgotten quirks in her surroundings pervaded unexpectedly. A smell of laundry had set into the walls of the side closet, a smell she had the opportunity to note several times before on dark, lonely nights. Her guard swelled. A familiar creaky floorboard was evaded. A precise sound from the past would be enough to tear the protective film. A tack strip next to the base of the stairs was amply stepped over; a potential stab from the past that was all too literal.

She entered another empty room dusted in the past. There was a sheet draped slightly askew over a cradle; another undisturbed thread suturing the void of memories. She tread just past the door, but not so close as to fall in. Her thoughts and memories swirled in each room like a vortex of feeling and existing. It was becoming too much, the void beckoned. She had developed a means to cope by this point in her life. A humble method that featured the beautiful adaptability of life. She took a step forward over an imaginary barrier, and filled her lungs. She could feel the pressure reach past her lungs. A literal action just as much as it was a metaphorical one. She let her surroundings in, but always had the power to steadily expel whatever came. It was a practice she developed at a young age in response to a parting that was ungrounded by the suppression of this simple right.

Her pass through her past led her by the empty cradle once more, down the winding staircase, through the dusty parlor, to the front door. (Successfully evading the creaky floorboard and tack strip once more). She took a step through, and turned to a side plot next to the weathered farm house. A seemingly misplaced rock lay nestled in some brush, but remained easily visible. Engraved was a pair of lines that read simply “ 1894-1900 Adeline Letterman An angel smothered by love” Her chest no longer clenched at the sight of the euphemism that bred a nasty sense of justification. She brought her hands to her chest to counter the pressure in her lungs. Just breathe.