I could tell the minute I got in the door and dropped my bag, I wasn't staying. There wasn't just one thing that made me want to rush back out the door and to the waiting taxi, it was everything all at once crashing in to my senses, overpowering them and crippling me back into the child I had been. I had forgotten the darkness of the front foyer, from the dark wood, to the slanted grey light that filtered through the years of dust and grime on the high windows.
The air held a stillness in it, as if the house were listening to me, awaiting something to fill the aching quiet. The noise of my bag hitting the ground seemed to echo around the hallway, up the stairs and into the empty bedrooms in mocking loudness. I could not move, neither in nor out awaiting something more than what was here in these skeletal surroundings that shoved a past life down my mouth and into my swirling belly.
Of course I was expecting her, hair flying out of her curlers and eyes shining in an almost unearthly gleam in her excitement, to burst from the door that swung between the front foyer and the kitchen and up to me with the smells of baking and apples to follow in her wake. The door did not move, did not burst open or hit the back side of the hallway as it should, it stood silent and tall, immobile in its truth of what I had lost and it was there that I finally discovered my loss as it hit me with the silence and the very lack of life that greeted me in this once welcoming space.
