theatrical_muse #200: Video
She’s not the one who’s dead, but when she gets home from her mother’s funeral, she moves through the house like a ghost. Memories seem to be inscribed in every surface she sees. The walls don’t just talk, they breathe. They scream at her sometimes, it seems. To say that life doesn’t end with death. A fact she already knows, having died once. It’s still a little while before her second death. If she had any idea there’d be another one, she’d be grateful her mom didn’t live to see it. To grieve, the way she does as she walks through the empty rooms. Silence curves around everything she sees. The soft curves of the couch in the living room, the sharp edges of the table in the kitchen, the shiny reflections of white porcelain and chrome in the bathroom.
This hasn’t been her childhood home. Buffy wasn’t born here. There’s no pictures of this house from when her parents were still together. Nothing pre-dating the teenage years that had actually made the move here a necessity. She tries to imagine her parents, still young, walking through the front door with her as a newborn, wrapped delicately in a pink blanket. Through the absence of sound, she tries to hear the shift of tiny footsteps, her own, echoing through the hall. A whole life she never lived flashes before her eyes and for one brief second, she envies Dawn and her memories of things that never happened. For being given a life, if only in her mind, that was somehow better than the one who was destined to have.
There’s no certainty, how long she’ll be able to keep this house. Buffy just knows that as long as she does, she’ll be able to keep the memories she does have. The real ones. And she tries not to think of how much she’ll forget when the curtains are long gone, and she can’t remember the proud look on her mom’s face once she’d gotten them hung. Or when she doesn’t have the banister to run her hand over to remind her of the times she’d gone running up those same steps only to sneak out the window.
Houses hold memories our minds don’t have room for. And some day, this one will belong to someone else. Walls painted over, new furniture, maybe even some updated fixtures. Dents in the walls will be patched, the scratch in the floor where her mother’s dresser had been too heavy for her to move by herself and had left its own warning will be sanded over. All she’ll have left is what she can remember without cues. And she wonders why of all the things that a Slayer is given, an infinite memory isn’t one of them. She has no idea that in just a few years, the house and the entire town around it will all sink miles beneath the surface of the Earth. Buffy isn’t even afforded the comfort of knowing that the memory of her mother will never be painted over.
Buffy Summers
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
509 Words