r (reposeremembers) wrote in repose, @ 2020-04-12 05:09:00 |
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Entry tags: | ren solitaire, ~plot: memories |
[Memory]
What: Memory
Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing.
Warning, this memory contains: Nada. There are NO WARNINGS HERE, PEOPLES.
The dark is warm and a little wet. You can hear the hum of insects, the whirr of sprinklers saturating grass while it’s dark enough that the sun won’t scorch through droplets. There’s a lot of effort in keeping things green, around here. You know this place better than any other place in the world, sometimes you think you always will. There are pieces of it that you keep, like the other guys do postcards, or pictures of girls they had before. There are, despite the fact that there are a lot of guys that like men, no pictures of guys kept zipped into wallets, there’s layers and layers of what’s cool and what isn’t, like the tulle invisible under a skirt.
You’ve got the plane’s hum in your head still, although you listened all the way along to the music from last night, even went to sleep with it tinny and small in your ears. Sugar-plums and sprinklings of snow. When you left the apartment this morning, it was slush and cold and thick around your ankles. Here, the weather doesn’t change much. It doesn’t season, and you feel older just by knowing that, by comparing it to things. A year ago, you had nothing to compare this place against. A year ago, you still had your laundry tossed in with everyone else’s, now you’re coming home and - okay, you have laundry, in the bag under your arm, but it’s not like, LAUNDRY. It’s just some extra stuff. You don’t need anyone to show you how to use the dryer, you’re not lazy about it anymore. You want clean stuff, you wash it yourself. That’s adulthood, right there.
You feel older right this second. Like you grew, like you fished out a shirt from last summer from the back of the dresser and you can feel the seams pop as you stretch into it.
That awareness is buoyant. It’s an expanse of air behind your ribs, locked behind your heart, it fills you up, holds you up. You’re an adult and you’re readying yourself for the walk in, for them to know just looking at you, that you’re changed. You don’t see a lot of difference in the mirror yet, you tapped out height-wise kinda early and you’re shaving more. Sorta. You’re definitely thinking about shaving more. You stand tall, the second your feet hit the sidewalk and you grin, a little. To yourself.
The smell is familiar. Dad slams the car-door behind him and you know they can hear it inside, because you heard it a thousand times over the last ten years. Games, recitals. You don’t remember a time before this house, but you remember this house. The hose is in the grass, like an over-large snake, and for a split second, memory within memory, you remember summer, the high, delighted shriek of your sister, water splattering, cold and staining the sidewalk dark for minutes before the sun dried it out again. There are lights in the windows. On the roof. They blink, and for a second you think it’s the same starlight and sugar-plum music from the plane.
For a second, you remember last night, the fresh sweat, the bubbling excitement flooding up from your stomach to your throat, a split second of hesitation before sliding free of the tangle of the wings. For a second, you’re a stranger, the grown adult who lives in the city totally independent. And then the door opens, and someone spills out, long hair, open arms. You can hear the laughter within. Music, someone talking over someone else, and there’s a squeeze somewhere in your middle and you’re pulled into the inside.
It’s like Superman. Clark Kent, whatever. For a second, on the doorstep you’re the stranger. And the next second, you’re inside and it’s like the shirt grew, or you shrank a little, but the warm, warm feeling in your stomach, the way your cheek aches, that shirt’s now about the most comfortable thing you own. It maybe doesn’t matter so much, that they don’t see you different. That she takes your bag from you, the one with the laundry that isn’t laundry, that you kinda can’t translate the city, the independence, into what you talk about right now. None of it matters. You’re home. And you’d kinda forgotten what that felt like, maybe because the feeling is so comforting and so all-consuming, it pricks the inside of your nose and dries out the back of your throat, you don’t know how to feel it and be the stranger. So you’re neither. You’re both, in the drape of an arm around your shoulders, in the way someone’s face is smile-bright, the way Dad kicks off his shoes and stretches out. You’re Clark Kent and that’s OK. Maybe you didn’t need to be the stranger at all.