I drop my backpack, throw down my suitcase, and fight the urge to burst out in song. Instead, I dance down the stairs, remembering exactly where each has waited for me these many months. I feel the dust on the old banister, see how quickly it turns my fingers gray, and smile, knowing the house has missed me. I grab a ledge, jump, and swing off of the side of the staircase just the way I used to. The house creaks, warmly protesting that it is far too old, and I am far too big, for such antics.
Some people might state that any finger would have garnered such dust, that any object of comparable mass and weight would have created an equal strain on the structure of this building. Some part of me agrees, but I left that part behind when I packed my bags. I left it in a small room where a young man, and a student sleeps, studies, and learns. Where a little boy lives deep inside himself, inside a small room, inside a large building, inside a great hub of knowledge, on a long coast, beside a vast ocean, on a tiny planet, in an ever expanding universe.
All this I left behind, can you blame me? For a few weeks I am not a student, one of many, but a unique and wonderful child, beyond compare or equal. A child that wishes it was as young, and strong and innocent as it once was. For you see, the house is not the only one who knows the time for make-believe is past. Yet, we fight it together. I don’t know what “it” is really… if it is time, or age, or wisdom. Is “it” perhaps change, or even reality? Whatever it is, we fight this nameless evil together, the house and I.
For you see, I did not jump off the stairs. I put my hands just where they should have been, but when I heard the house creak, I am ashamed to say it; I recoiled. I stopped and walked down the rest of the staircase. My months of study had the desired effect. In my mind I had already swung down, laughing all the way, yet somewhere between my imagination and my fingertips the student lay in ambush and overwhelmed my inexperienced innocence, which was too stiff from its months of captivity to fight back.
The house lets me stretch muscles only children can have. It beckons me to days without frowns, when friendly monsters lurked under covers, and animals were playmates. It rejuvenates me in a way no ambrosia or doctors prescription can, it rejuvenates me just like an ice cream sundae used to… before I learned about the dentist, and cavities. Before I learned to multiply, or divide, or even write my name… before I learned about pain. I confess, the student in me knows the house and I fight a hopeless battle, but the inner child is stubborn in its resistance, and the house is still much the same as it was then. I love it for that; it gives me strength.
Sometimes, as I feel the surfaces of the various artifacts of my life, it seems to me that the house has saved this dust just for me, to remind me of what was, and how long it has been since then. In this place, for an instant, I am in a world without limits. And the dust is not particles from the surface I am touching, but magical moon-dust, flowing out of my finger tips from somewhere inside, where it lay dormant, imprisoned, waiting for a hero to save it. There is still great power in that moment, and, for just that moment, the house and I have won.
My learning teaches me that such moments will be fewer and fewer as the earth revolves around the sun in its damnably predictable path… but I hope not. I hope that as the dust grows thicker, the magic will become stronger. That, somehow, the less I recall of what I once was, the more the house will overflow with reminders for me. One memory gives me hope in particular; on a vacation long ago, my family visited the house my dad grew up in. There was something in his face that day, a light I had never seen before, and never since; I did not understand then. Now I know a measure of what he must have felt, and I am proud; proud he has held out so long against “it.”
He gives me hope, that no matter how old I get, there will always be small victories for the child in me, and days like today, when the earth reverses its orbit. Days when I am not a human being, I’m a Hero, and the house is not a mere building in a larger world, but a castle, and a world unto itself. If only I can learn to hold fast to these days I think I will have learned something more valuable than any degree.
-December 8, 2005
|
Submission Name: Home
