As I pass through shadowy paths and places, my mind split and vision disconnected from what should be my reality, I remember that the last thing I knew, I was thinking about what to have for dinner the next night.
Right now as I slip in and out of a recreation of my childhood, all my hunger is gone, for food anyway. My past is the present yet it's warped into different, zig-zag pieces that is nearly impossible for me to figure out. I'm hungry for answers because I don't know why I'm here.
The old apartment complex where I grew up is the same but not the same, some simulation of what was the best and the worst of my childhood.
There at my old home, in front of the patio where I sat on the grass reading books that made me want to travel the world, is something that has twisted in on itself into a mockery of my memory.
Cobwebs cover the patio, thick weeds overgrown where I'd stretched out like a contented cat, making up fantasies and dreaming of adventure. I enter my old family home, hoping to find where I'd come and what I had to gain from revisiting something that couldn't be revived and I find more shadows and cold spaces where there had been warmth. Calling out for answers bring me no answers as it is just a series of large, empty rooms.
I find it hard to believe that anyone has ever lived there. Had I really lived there or had I just imagined a time when I had? I take another step and go through a door that I don't remember into the last place my family had lived in before death struck us, further into the past before I learned new lessons on what it meant to be a survivor.
There is even more emptiness but more than that, a feeling of malevolence in each room and each moment of what I had known to be the opposite. The old living room was not as how we'd left it, the thick dust coating the floors and walls like something out of a graveyard, which in a sense it was, as sickness had taken root there and planted itself in the backwards part of my memory, erupting as distorted crops.
I'm looking around for something of familiarity in a place I thought I'd find peace but there really is none to be found here because this is not my home and has turned into something else frightening.
Now, it's just a hollow recreation of moments looped together with fear. In an inverted world, I walk down a narrow hallway into my bedroom where I'd been a nine year old kid cutting funny pictures out of magazines and taping them to my walls.
Smoke comes from the corner by the window and I see the lit tip of my grandmother's cigarette. She's back with no explanation as to her return.
She doesn’t say anything, just smiles at me, continuing to puff, puff away and I couldn't think of what I could ask a ghost when I was still alive. But then again, I wasn't sure about anything these days.
Stop that, you'll get cancer I told grandma's ghost. And I wouldn't want to lose you again. But she just continues to grin and fades into the walls along with the smoke I always secretly loved the fragrance of but ran away from in fear for my lungs.
New odors hit me, the scent of my mother's cooking from the kitchen, but when I walk down grey and distorted halls, I can’t see anything except a cold stove and more hollow spaces. I look around for an exit but there are no more escape hatches to be found and the loneliness is overwhelming.
The concept of finality always has held such dread for me in my life. Sitting on the floor, these are the strung-together sequence of memories, I know, has held together what I used to call 'nostalgia' but which now takes on an alternate meaning.
There was just myself to contend with now, no more specters. There was time to deal with the present and the past combined and look for the answers I'd been seeking no one else besides me could give me.
There's no sun or moonlight here so I cannot count the days but I've passed through these rooms and seen my dead grandmother so many times I've lost count. I've yet to find the truth but one of these days, it'll come to me.
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