Into the Sun

I am sitting at a bus stop. It is raining, harder than I expected, a light drizzle now a constant flood that drowns out all sound. White noise from a fuzzy television that stretches on forever. I cannot remember if I meant to take the bus, but that no longer matters, its last stop at least an hour before.

Did I bring…? I look down to my feet. The umbrella is there, folded, wrapped; a mummy of plastic waiting to be unfurled. My short term memory, up to six hours, no longer exists. I will not remember every detail of my day until tomorrow.

It is a cruel hand that fate has dealt me. A royal flush with one card off. Perfection with a single, inescapable flaw. I am not bitter, only disappointed.

My long term, however remains.

My films about ghosts, replay themselves on antique reels, showing me the way life once was. Mother in an apron, pulling cookies out of an oven, Father watching the six o’clock news in his easy chair. Sister, straightening her hair and touching up her makeup before school. I can remember every exact detail about those days.

The scented candle that Mother changed with the seasons.

The wood that the dining room table was made out of.

The location of every painting in the house.

Names are lost to me. It does not fit into my brain, one specific gear clogged or button pushed too far down. An internal fix, which I can never seem to reach.

I reach down and slowly pick up the umbrella. Its handle is not the cheap plastic that slips off the fingers, but a soft wood. Oak? I raise it to my lips. It smells like a mixture of oak and sandalwood, soothing and yet still strengthening. A firm massage in an umbrella handle. Did I purchase this?

Mother says that I used to have agoraphobia. To set a foot outside was to purposely bathe in liquid acid, as though touching earth would burn me to the bone. I am not sure how many times I have asked myself, what was I afraid of?

Sunlight does not burn; the dirt is cool beneath my feet. I cannot wear shoes; they restrict this freedom that I have acquired. I do not fear asphalt, it does not scratch or tear my soles. Did I once believe it would?

I always wanted to touch the rain, to reach out and have a drop fall into my open palm. I could raise it to eye level, examining anything and everything about it. Reflection, refraction, every taste and tease of light to bounce off the convex surface would be mine and mine alone. I have never been so possessive. Not even with the house.

I stand, the awkward mixture of glass and plastic and metal that makes up the bus stop still shielding me. I extend my arm into the grey mess of rain and forgotten memories, my wrist flicks and there is a soft explosion of color and displacement. It is hard to describe the opening of an umbrella, mechanics at work in automatic function. It does not matter as I position the protection above me, my toes touch slick pavement and I am in the rain.

Is it wrong of me to lust after the faintest of blurs around a corner? The whisper of a touch on my shoulder? Things that I felt while alone in the house, things only I perceived. The house was mine. I cared for it like a mother cares for her newborn: constant attention, never-ceasing love, frequent caresses and kisses.

Father called it unnatural, the affinity I possessed for the house. I’d rather like to say that the house had an attachment to me. I often felt a sigh of happiness when I would stroke the sandpaper walls in the basement or an extra bounce to my step as I walked barefoot across perfectly polished hardwood floors. I used to think that Father was jealous that the house liked me more, now I know; Father just didn’t like the house.

The house’s favorite music was classical. The first time I played it Chopin, the house knocked three plates off of a shelf and the broken pieces formed a heart. Mother was furious, but I felt love and delight engulf my soul. I had made the house happy.

It is not windy out today. The rain falls straight towards the earth, gravity forcing it into spheres and splashes. Each hard droplet against my umbrella keeps me on my toes. I wish I could walk without plastic between us, drenching my life-starved body in unadulterated purity.

My room is painted the softest of browns, parchment, as Mother used to call it. It is a soothing color, it kept me sane on most days. Before it was repainted, I would wake to the most frantic scribbles of a sharpie marker. It would be different things: the lyrics of songs I had never heard, quotes from books I had never read. One morning it was the complete Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx. Every afternoon Mother would whitewash it over again. I was never sure why she did.

Most days, all the wall said was the house.

Those days scared me the most.

City life intrigues me, the buildings that appear to brush the sky like the softest of kisses, more neon than the eye can really handle, the constant flow and ebb of movement, an on-going, rushing tide.

I prefer side streets and alleys; avoid the human madness of main streets and sidewalks. I like to trace the graffiti on the concrete walls and imagine what it was like to shake the can and have color explode from the nozzle, painting a picture or a word.

Rain-washed dirty streets leave my feet covered in the filth and life of the city. I always walk this way to get home, through the high rises and glass-faced structures back into suburbia. The rain is getting lighter now, tapping instead of throbbing onto the umbrella. I think I will not need it soon.

I have been here too long. I can feel it gnawing in the pit of my stomach, trying to crawl its way out of me.

I’m not sure what exhausted me more in those days, my own fears and frustrations or the house. I could not ignore the house as I could sleep away my fear of the unknown outside world. Some days the house would not let me alone. I could not escape it. Maybe that’s what drove me to crack the door. I had to crack it at least, before I flung it open into oblivion.

I can remember that the house was angry the first time I opened the window myself, it shuddered and the window crashed closed, the glass shattering into pieces and pieces. Mother made me pick them all up. My fingertips were so bloody that the carpet stained red and Mother never got it out. It might still be there.

I have hit the edge of the neighborhood. I, at least, can remember the yellow house on the left. It has blue shutters that remind me of white sand and crystal water. I am only four turns away from my destination and yet, I walk slower. I have never driven a car, but Mother used to say that when she was not sure how to get to a place, she would turn down the radio when she thought she was close. It never did anything, but Mother said she would always find it soothing. Father would laugh and comment on how he would do that too, how everyone would do it, and no one knew why.

I make the first turn. It is tiring to walk down these streets. I am haunted by the quick glimpses of faces I never knew. They were all horrified, bathed in the orange-tinted glow from that night. Shadows gave them features that they did not originally possess, twisting them into nightmares. Children, the elderly, middle-aged and adolescent, all contorted by my doing.

After the open window, the house began to make advances. I would reach, ever so slightly towards a latch or frame and a door would slam in another room or picture-frame would crack. It was a warning. I belonged to the house and I would continue to do so. I was tired. Tired of being shackled to it, tired of its possessive games. The thing that I had once loved the most had turned against me; a puppy that had its tail accidently stepped on, now snapped at his masters hand.

But it wasn’t just the house.

I was tired of Father’s complaints, how he couldn’t stand the fact that I never left while he was never there. A nine to five made nine to ten by over stress and laziness. Mother endlessly pestering me to try, just try, to take a step outside, when I knew I wasn’t ready. When I knew I still was afraid of the earth. And Sister, Sister’s infinite teasing of how I would never know anything like she did, never have friends, never go to movies or out to dinner, never see a football game. As thought I had always wanted those things. As though I had always yearned for the outside world, but was too afraid to take a chance on it all.

When really, it was just the house.

The house was the reason I stayed. I wanted it, wanted to love it, care for it, keep it safe from the corruption and dirt of modern technology and ideals. I was sick of society and how it made pets of other men and objects. The house was not merely a house. It has a conscious and a soul. It was a creature who was capable of everything from walking to putting on a hat. I knew that it would be mine and I would be its. Until the house decided that I would have no other.

All I had asked was for Mother to bring me matches. We were not connected in the mind, me and the house, but somehow it knew of my plotting. I was not foolish, but neither was it.

I was walking to get them from her, the matches. The house barely raised one of the stairs by an inch. It was as though I was floating, flying for an endless moment. Freed from the oppression of the house and its weight had been lifted off me. Reality smashed around me in the form of solid oak floors and drywall. I felt it, the fear of the house. It was young, it could not understand, but there was more blood than last time and it trembled with unwanted anticipation.

I shakily stood, Mother supporting me. I did not want to touch it; I did not want to feel it beneath my feet. The house had betrayed me and I knew that this would be the end.

I returned up the steps, pressing down hard with my feet, the barest taste of the punishment to come. When I reached my room, the house tried to apologize, to comfort me. Windless curtains tried to caress me, wrap themselves around me in remorse. I would not hear of it. The matches in hand, I stood in the center of the room, my room, where I had watched the house grow and change, where I had spent the last years here, happy and terrified of living.

“You will plague me no more.” I struck the match.

The last two turns are the easiest, then third lot from the right it sits. When the wind blows, the ash kicks up into the street, an embodied cloud of what was once there. The charred remains still smell smoky, of burnt leaves and fear. I visit this place every day. I reach down, as according to my ritual and touch a small piece of the blackened ruin. I lower the umbrella that I do not remember buying, shaking it once. It has stopped raining. I roll it up carefully and carry it in the crook of my arm. I give the grave of the house one last look, then turn back down the street and out of the neighborhood, back to my apartment, in the city.

I walked slowly down the stairs then, taking my time. Mother was screaming at the bottom but I did not hear her. I was filled with triumph. I had overcome all that had kept me trapped here, all that scared me and locked me away in invisible shackles. Through the kitchen, the living room, into the hall. I stood, paused for the briefest of seconds, before I flung the door wide and stepped out, into the sun.