by Erin Ajello
Occasionally, I find myself driving aimlessly.
This happens most on calm summer nights, when the air is cool, the wind non-existent, and the road empty.
When I start these late night rides, I try not to pick any particular destination.
Instead, I pick a direction and drive till I reach water before turning around.
Yet as seemingly destination-less as these drives are intended to be, I find that more often than not these trips end at a small house on the south shore of the island.
In the dark, when the lights are off and the new family in that house lies still, it is almost unrecognizable as my childhood home.
Somehow, this manages to stir some small sort of resentment in me.
How dare others not see this place for what I do?
I look up at the second floor window on the left and see a fifteen year old girl’s first kiss.
The front door may currently be locked but I see myself running through it hundreds of times, always in a hurry to leave this place I keep returning to.
Maybe I can only come here at night because that’s when my ghosts are strongest.
At times like these (two, three, four in the morning) I am so easily overcome by memories.
Is it only me?
Where is my mother, my father, my sister?
How do they avoid the pull of reverie that leads me here?
Are their experiences in this house lost to them?
If so, I envy their amnesia, for no matter what I do, how many new moments I live through, I am drawn back here.
These four dull walls, this badly shingled roof, that claustrophobic yard have a strange hold on me.
(I actually liked the front door better back when it had chipped blue paint).
The small yard was once constantly merry, having held frequent barbeques for as many people as we could fit in that cramped space.
That space that seemed so much larger a decade ago, when I would sit to paint my nails on the overgrown grass, when the summer air was as it is now, comfortingly cool.
When I sit in silence and stare at this building that was once my home, I can see more than my home.
My entire childhood remains, preserved inside, immortalized for me to remember.
