From Whence I Came
There is a house about 400 miles from here. In my mind, when I think of it, it looms in the landscape much like the Psycho house. It's not a spooky Victorian, though; it's not on a hillside. Nothing deeply disturbing or terrifying ever happened in it--no axe murders or suicides. It's not really an old house. It's two years younger than I am, so it's 32, built by my father and my grandfather. It is ill-cared for; it was never truly finished (although I believe it would have been if my grandfather had lived), sporting empty sockets where cabinets should be, peeling paint, a leaking roof, a cement basement that would be stark if it weren't for the stacks of books, boxes, machinery, and miscellany that fill every corner of it. It is a square box of a house, a parody of solemn east-coast mansions. It has an open floorplan on the ground floor, designed (so my father professes) to allow for parties and guests (that never were) for growing girls. To me, it will always be a ghost-house, an empty shell like a spider's discarded skin. It is a quiet house, a silent house, an abandoned house, though it is still occupied. It is a cold house. It is a place I fled when I was seventeen, though I am continually drawn back to it by some imagined tie. It fascinates me, its image occupies my mind. This house, I see potential in it. I see how it could have been a house full of life, full of guests, full of parties and joys and sorrows. Somehow it has been trapped in some dimension of troubles never whispered, joys never experienced, lives never lived. In that dimension it stays as the weeds grow up around it, as the blackberry bushes become brambles, impeding upon a lawn that was never planted. Here is my heritage, my terror, the place from whence I came...