It doesn't feel like I wrote any of this. Like someone else used my hands to write their story, write their pain. It's been too long.
It's kind of like a snapshot, I suppose. Of a different me, with different worries and different hopes and different dreams. He had no idea of what he'd see, what he'd do in the years to come. I wonder what he'd think of all this? Did he expect us to take this path? Or try to veer away?
To me, it looked the same as when I first left it. The house stood there lone and wordless, like a dog waiting for his owner to come home. Lawn overgrown, windows boarded and broken, it doesn't look like my home anymore.
I walk into the ruined house, the door creaking and groaning as I slowly enter. It clatters back closed as I step forward, shaking loose some dust from the ceiling. Dancing, pirouetting in this loose breeze in a house that's only known stillness and quiet. The quiet, it returns too, enveloping the place, as if it had never left to begin with. Tranquility.
I enter the living room. It looks the same as any other, undisturbed, untouched. The couches, the chairs, the shelves, each with their own fine layer of dust - the one uniform aspect of the place. My presence here breaks the fragile tension of the place, each step sending the dust upwards in tangos and swings. Little shining motes dancing in the feeble rays coming in through the window. Everything else is where it was. The frames are still standing, the photos still preserved. Small little time capsules of another life. Another life. Smiling faces. A birthday cake being blown out. A family.
There's a mirror. Wiping the dust from it, and there I am. Weathered by age, worn by experience. The person in the mirror would be unrecognisable to the people that once lived here. Even I can't see myself in him. Is he really the same boy who lived here, who laughed here?
Heading into one of the rooms, I pause. I let the moment pass over me, taking note of that peaceful silence before I creak open the door, entering carefully, delicately. The bed's still tucked in nicely at least. The posters have long since gone. At least the books remained as they were, standing watch, yellowed and mostly legible. I don't recognise any of this.
Everything here has stood still, this one fixed point in time, while all around it has gone forward. I'm too far forward to appreciate this homecoming. It's all the same as before, and yet not - the image in my head doesn't match this tomb. It's too quiet. Too still.
There's nothing. Nothing but quiet.
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