Scientist Studies

One of my first poems/stories.

 

            There I stood, in our old living room, alone. At that moment, I felt as if I were the only person in existence. As if everybody I knew or had ever known�"all my family, my friends�"had vanished. Sent off to oblivion. Mom's old chestnut coffee table was still there, though. It was good to see something familiar. It was comforting. I remember when I hit my knee on it. We shouldn't have been wrestling in the house. Mom warned us a million times. I still have the scar.

            The living room and everything in it; especially Mom's coffee table, was spotless. The once cluttered room was no more. The day I left, the coffee table was completely cluttered with dirty dishes, empty soda cans, empty bags from potato chips�"it was messy�"like it had always been after the days when our friends would come over and we'd play video games and watch movies all night. That's how the table had looked before I left. Now it was clean and spotless.

            The room was lonely, cold, and bare. Just thinking of the times we'd had in this room... it was almost scary. It seems like just yesterday, we were here�"our friends to�"talking, laughing, playing games and eating junk food. It was as if our living room were Times Square yesterday and a ghost town today. The absence of life in the room made me feel almost as if I were dreaming or as if I were looking at the room through a wall of glass. Like, my living room was part of some crazy science experiment and I was a mad scientist, in a lab coat, looking through

            The room looked smaller than I remembered it. As a child, it was my massive jungle gym, as a teenager; a cool place to hang out, now a small, bare room with poor lighting.

            The space in the corner of the living room, where our old grandfather clock used to sit was now occupied by an ugly, unfamiliar touchier lamp. I looked at that lamp with hatred. I didn't want it there. Something about it made things uneasy for me. Where had our grandfather clock gone? The once familiar and comforting sound of the grandfather clock's bell that rang all throughout my childhood had vanished. The sound of the bell now travels through space forevermore, never to rest. I can hear it in my head, still. I can only remember it. I will never hear it again. My childhood is over.