ljrevival-01
For this prompt at ljrevival
“Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.”
The last ones looked for it. They waded through their memories, thick with the algae of years, finding only hints of a building from childhood. They were the youngest, the only ones left who had been old enough to feel the small swell of identity at being from somewhere, a strange, glowing feeling that was as close as any of them could get to ancestry. They were convinced that the most vivid bits would confirm its being when found: a hotel gutted of its former inhabitants' old rooms, the strangeness of a school filled again with children of a different kind, or the ruin crumbling down into dusty oblivion. There are no certainties concerning what it became after the last students were filed away somewhere, and they go on searching. Eventually there is no one to remember and the bricks might have been imagined anyway, the way they felt under hand or looked against the trees. After enough time the students themselves are long since gone, names forgotten, anonymous as the alphabet.
The last of Hailsham was tucked away in an attic, folded into little squares and layered one on top of the other in neat piles. Bits of it were organized by dates written on tiny slips of paper, with cramped, neat handwriting, attached to the edges. Closer to the door they were less orderly, some strewn about the floor and pressing on each other with little care. Paintings and drawings, sculptures made by immature hands, the sprawling sketches of a long-armed girl. Without specific instructions they were dispersed, valued according to current fashions or the taste and perspective of the people charged with selling the estate (what little was left of it).
“A connection with some kind of school,” they'd say filtering in and out of the house, a few customers picking through linens and mismatched saucers, gesturing to the faded watercolour with a price that prevented its immediate sale. Maybe she looked at it when she asked, thinking little of it, and the heart that was not hers beat a little harder, excited and aching for the place it recognized. She attributes the feeling to the darkness of the hall and the air that hangs stale there, a sudden spell explained away by it's fleeting presence.
In the end a few of the traditionally better pieces went home in the back of cars while the rest made their way into charity shops or dumpsters, untethered and released into a world of lost things. They are only the memories of the forgotten, stretching farther away, objects adrift.
(I had a hard time with this, and I kind of can't believe I'm actually posting it, but, you know. I don't know if I'm anywhere near even alright with it, but it works in a weird, not quite there sort of way. I don't think we need any more of Kathy or the rest, not the details, because at the end of the book it doesn't really matter. It's just that there is this whole thing, this group of kids who aren't even a whole generation, lost and forgotten like they never even existed or mattered and kills me. They're just gone, and no one knows or cares that they lived and felt and all of that, and then I'm so terribly preoccupied with buildings and things and what happens to the things? Maybe it's because of the past two years, all of the objects we've accumulated from loved ones who have died or who have forgotten they had things to begin with, that I'm suddenly terribly preoccupied with it all. So, uh, this is my meager little offering, because I couldn't think of anything else except the building and the art, and anything else I tried to do seemed trite, even if this does too, maybe it's a little bit less so.)
“Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.”
The last ones looked for it. They waded through their memories, thick with the algae of years, finding only hints of a building from childhood. They were the youngest, the only ones left who had been old enough to feel the small swell of identity at being from somewhere, a strange, glowing feeling that was as close as any of them could get to ancestry. They were convinced that the most vivid bits would confirm its being when found: a hotel gutted of its former inhabitants' old rooms, the strangeness of a school filled again with children of a different kind, or the ruin crumbling down into dusty oblivion. There are no certainties concerning what it became after the last students were filed away somewhere, and they go on searching. Eventually there is no one to remember and the bricks might have been imagined anyway, the way they felt under hand or looked against the trees. After enough time the students themselves are long since gone, names forgotten, anonymous as the alphabet.
The last of Hailsham was tucked away in an attic, folded into little squares and layered one on top of the other in neat piles. Bits of it were organized by dates written on tiny slips of paper, with cramped, neat handwriting, attached to the edges. Closer to the door they were less orderly, some strewn about the floor and pressing on each other with little care. Paintings and drawings, sculptures made by immature hands, the sprawling sketches of a long-armed girl. Without specific instructions they were dispersed, valued according to current fashions or the taste and perspective of the people charged with selling the estate (what little was left of it).
“A connection with some kind of school,” they'd say filtering in and out of the house, a few customers picking through linens and mismatched saucers, gesturing to the faded watercolour with a price that prevented its immediate sale. Maybe she looked at it when she asked, thinking little of it, and the heart that was not hers beat a little harder, excited and aching for the place it recognized. She attributes the feeling to the darkness of the hall and the air that hangs stale there, a sudden spell explained away by it's fleeting presence.
In the end a few of the traditionally better pieces went home in the back of cars while the rest made their way into charity shops or dumpsters, untethered and released into a world of lost things. They are only the memories of the forgotten, stretching farther away, objects adrift.
(I had a hard time with this, and I kind of can't believe I'm actually posting it, but, you know. I don't know if I'm anywhere near even alright with it, but it works in a weird, not quite there sort of way. I don't think we need any more of Kathy or the rest, not the details, because at the end of the book it doesn't really matter. It's just that there is this whole thing, this group of kids who aren't even a whole generation, lost and forgotten like they never even existed or mattered and kills me. They're just gone, and no one knows or cares that they lived and felt and all of that, and then I'm so terribly preoccupied with buildings and things and what happens to the things? Maybe it's because of the past two years, all of the objects we've accumulated from loved ones who have died or who have forgotten they had things to begin with, that I'm suddenly terribly preoccupied with it all. So, uh, this is my meager little offering, because I couldn't think of anything else except the building and the art, and anything else I tried to do seemed trite, even if this does too, maybe it's a little bit less so.)