by Alistair Marquise

Created on: September 04, 2009   Last Updated: February 23, 2011

I haunt this house as an amorphous representation of solitude- a shade without form. Delicately caressing bare walls, I creep into empty rooms and settle into their dark, vacant corners. There used to be furniture and decorations and tools and toys that occupied these rooms, certainly the dead space left behind by their absence makes the rooms seem bigger. However, it was the voices of those who once lived here that truly kept the house from lifeless emptiness. It was the voices, the laughing and giggling, the sighs of contentment, the gentle tones of loving expressions, that brought the walls in closer and wrapped them around you like concrete and plaster blankets. The voices are gone now, as is their particular emotional alchemy that transmuted glass and stone into warmth and happiness. Now I wonder, do these walls hold me in, or do they simply keep life out?

At night I progress through the cavernous emptiness. My footsteps make light noises, the gentle thuds produced by the soles of my boots dissipating as they brush against the empty walls and ceilings, barely creating echoes that serve as my brief companions. Air displaced by my movements threatens to disturb the settled perfection of the memories that linger here. The images are so fragile, so delicate. I crouch down and extend a palsied hand toward them. "Please come back to me," I whisper. "I need to feel you again. This... this solitude is too much." But frightened by me, by my drawn and dissolved appearance, they run away on precarious, impossibly fine glass feet. The memories cannot exist without me, yet they would choose to disappear and die rather than inhabit my mind. How can I expect them to accept me now? They are so pure, so good. I have no right to them any longer. They don't, and perhaps never did, belong to me.

I hold my form against the walls, pressing my face to the paint. I try to breathe in their odors, what they absorbed, in an attempt to be fulfilled once again by their memories, but my lungs only fill with stagnation. Even these, the ethereal scents of the past, have left the house. There is no point in searching anymore, there hasn't been for some time. Every night I creep about this house, aching to discover memories that might be hidden in the still dark, digging into every nook, every hole. I am a twisted mind somehow confined within a shapeless form, the ghost of my heart beats just enough to ensure that I stay alive in order to experience the emptiness. I thought the house was welcoming me to stay with it forever, to be comforted by its walls and the memories they contained, but now I realize that it was only beckoning to my subconscious desire to be punished. It lured me in with the memories, and as soon as it had me within its deceptively comforting embrace, it allowed the memories to escape and now holds me trapped inside its vacant strucure. Painful glimpses that lay just out of reach, forever taunting me, this is what I am left with. I am enclosed, alone within nothing.

I have been abandoned by my memories.

This is my solitude.

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