Rarely, but I still have the desire to visit my parents' empty house. There are so many memories there, but without my parents, those memories hurt my heart. I take a handful of snow with my bare hands. I feel its coldness as if penetrating my skin. I see melting snowflakes on my fingers. The cold makes you freeze. Not only your skin. It penetrates into your capillaries, veins, and even deeper. The cold makes you freeze even your time. I look at the snow in my hands, and it seems like the red nail polish is starting to turn into blood. I stand in the yard, I look at the locked door and I don't seem to have the strength to pull the key out of my pocket. So, first of all, I turned to the garden.
How strange, there is so much snow around, and not a single snowman. In my childhood, as soon as it snowed, we would run outside and check if the snow was sticky, if we could make snowmen. The yards were full of them. I never understood why children no longer build snowmen with carrots for noses. Instead, the path behind the fence is full of shoe prints on snow. Shoes that eventually turn the snow into one dirty gray mass, which speaks of all the consequences of civilization, and even more so of the fact that people nowadays have enough money for leather shoes.
And then I go, unlock the door and go through all the rooms one after another, stroking each piece of furniture, each photo that still stands there. Our happy family still looks out of them.
I make coffee. There is nothing to do, so I just sit in the kitchen by the window, looking at the roofs of houses on both sides of the road. My childhood and part of my youth passed here. The most beautiful time. The evening is slowly falling outside the window, which is coming, although you don't have time to realize it. Evening, painfully penetrating through the blinds and reminding you of the childish joy left there, in the other world. In a world that no longer belongs to you. Or maybe it never belonged to you. You still try to remember it: books, waiting at the window for the dad to come home. The window through which the way home opened. I don't remember the people anymore, most of them left, like my parents. It's as if they never existed. Only in dreams do the faces of the past sometimes appear, now almost frightening.
So frightening that you wake up, covered in a cold sweat, and it becomes difficult to breathe. And why? After all, you would gladly fall silent along with the clocks, covered in a thick layer of dust. And you would remain like this forever, on the windowsill, with your legs dangling down and the silent cuckoos that never struck twelve. But no. Having gathered all your strength, you breathe in This World...
Today I am tormented by very strange associations. Yes, I remember the past and the present as well. Today I found myself in a different world, I let my childhood inside me. And then everything was different. It's hard to understand how the world has changed. I look at the yard in the present and see the yard of my childhood. Everything was not the same as now. Then the yard was full of blooming flowers in the summer, and in the winter, decorated by small and big snowmen. Now there is neither one nor the other. The yard is empty, and no one comes out to water the flowers or dig off the snow from the path.
But no matter how painful memories are without parents, they are still very dear to our hearts, so we can't force ourselves to sell a parent's house. Although we should do it, of course. Just imagining that other children running around in our childhood yard still makes my heart beat faster.
I wash my coffee cup in the sink and wipe it dry. I put it in the cupboard. It seems that there is nothing more to do. I turn off the light on the porch and locked the door again. Until next time. And those times are rare, because coming here, the soul is triggered a lot.
Thank you for reading.
You are always welcome to check my posts.
All photos are original, taken by me.
