The Dark and the Light

Home Again

          There's a cold draft that brushes my face and causes an involuntary shudder to rush through me. I hadn't been here in years and the changes were shocking. The walls were painted a bright pink, the white carpet had just been installed, the furniture was brand new and freshly painted white, and there were brand new stuffed animals everywhere. Everything was still here, it was just different. My old bed that was a crisp white with light pink sheets inside had turned brown. The beautiful, soft carpet that had once been was now crunchy, missing in places, and nearly black. The bright pink paint that once covered the walls had faded and peeled. All of my childhood stuffed animals that I was forced to leave behind had moths at one point and now were just bits of material laying on the revolting floor.

When I was a child, this place couldn't be touched by the dark realities of life, but when we were forced out of our homes and into the brutal world that the monsters had created for us, that's when I realized no where was safe.

It had taken me 70 years to get back to this palace. I don't know what I had expected, but this wasn't it. Maybe I had hoped to walk in and become a child again. Enter my room and see my parents standing there ready to play with me for hours on end then tuck me into the pink bed fit for a child. Or maybe I had hoped that it had been destroyed beyond recognition and I could say "No, no this is not my home. I never lived here. My home is a beautiful palace that the world has preserved just for me to come back to!" Maybe if it had been ransacked I could have left here with a sense of hope instead of this awful despair.

So much had changed since the day I had left, yet everything was exactly the same. I could still hear my mother's voice calling me from the kitchen telling me I could lick the cookie dough spoon and my dad shouting 'Hey!' as he walked in from work. Even in these silent halls where only the wind and mice dared to speak I could still hear them.

Shuffling past the doorway, I start to feel along the under edge of my bed. Finally finding the small handle I had been searching for, I gently pull on it till a tin box the size of a mini Altoids container appears in my hand. Slowly going to the far corner adjacent to the door, I lean down and search with my eyes for the small hole in the carpet that I used to put candy and other hidden treasures in. Finding the hole, I put my pinky down it before I can think about the creatures possibly down there. I shuffle through ripped paper wrappers, a pebble that I had once been fascinated with, and the ribbon, that had rotted with time, that still held the kernel sized key.

Lifting the key from the hole with my pinky, I marvel at how small it has become. Puting it up to the tin, I slowly put it in the key hole, and turn it carefully so it won't break. When the worn lid opens, I see my treasure. The one thing that had kept me going for years. The object that had represented times of freedom to my family.