Prompt #26

I spent the first seven years of my life in an apartment in northern New Hampshire.  I hadn’t been there since we moved, but for the first time, I was coming home.

We had the upstairs apartment, and in my head it was a long ways up.  The stairs surprised me at first, but of course I was little then, so it would seem higher.  After climbing the rickety stairway, I came to the door.  The key fit and I was inside.

The place smelled terribly like cigarette smoke.  I remember my mother complaining that if the downstairs neighbors didn’t leave or quit smoking then soon the whole building would wreak.  She was right.  The kitchen that also served as our dining room was so small.  How did we fit in here?  In my head I saw the little table where I spent my first few birthdays, and for a moment the room was warm and happy again.  I saw the candles, and my mother’s smile, and my sisters and I gathered around the cake.  But the vision died and the room was stark, and small, and bare again. 

Remembering the many Christmas’ spent in our living room, I hurried from the cold kitchen.  The blue carpeting was still there, but now it was stained and worn.  The fireplace was cold, and the room felt so different.  I walked to the window, but the familiar house across the street had been torn down.  That funny tree whose leaves always turned bright colors in the summer instead of fall was reduced to a stump. 

I peeked into my old bedroom, where I occupied the bottom bunk.  I slid my hand across the walls that had been painted a pale shade of pink when I was there.  Now they were white.  My hand caught in a hole in the wall, and I was sad to see that this room had not stayed the peaceful place I remembered.  My father cultivated my music taste during these years, making endless cd’s of lullabies for my sister and I.  I have never abandoned my fondness for a soft tune.  The room was cold though, and the last thing I wanted to hear was the music that made the room mine.  Not now, not the way it was.

I walked back out onto the rickety staircase and locked the door behind me.  The thought flashed across my mind that I would like to see the old place burn.  But I knew that such thoughts were useless.  The house in my mind had already burned.