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| "Sun in an Empty Room" by Edward Hopper |
I think of yellow light pressing against dirty windows, falling into nearly empty rooms, pooling on bare sloped floors: wood, yellowed linoleum, dingy blue carpet tiles. I think of the dry scuff of feet. A couch being squeezed back out through a narrow door the way it came in, somebody saying, “I’ve got it. I’ve got it. Now watch the corner,” their footsteps down a long hallway, a pause at the stairs, a thump, then another, and then slow footsteps going down.
I think of you, alone in those empty rooms where even your breath is too loud, and of the closet where your clothes hung, now yawning like an empty mouth, still holding your smell, but already fading into wood and plaster and air . . .
I think of you turning a slow circle in silence, wall to wall to window to wall. Remembering where the pictures hung, remembering the luminescent green of your aloe, your ficus, back-lit in sunlight this time of day. The way the curtain hung there--hung there just this morning yet--before you slipped it from its rod, the way the curtain lifted in the warm May breeze as gently as a dancer’s white hands, and then fell, sucked suddenly taut to the screen, a dress in the wind, a woman holding her breath.
And you turn again then, surprised that no face is in the mirror, that isn’t in the place where the mirror was, above the dresser, that you have emptied out--socks and underwear, slips and night gowns--into black garbage bags--and then stacked the drawers---woody and splintered and lighter than you would have thought--one atop the other, and rolled the dresser on its squeaking wheels into the hall.
Does it seem somehow, that your face still hangs there, where it always was? Where you found it smiling or crying or tired? And your image brushing its hair, twisting it into a clip, clasping a necklace or earrings. Hooking or unhooking a bra. Letting a dress fall. Standing there naked before the glass watching gravity happen, taking its time?
Now the walls are too naked. Walls, once white, now their shame is yellow. And the places somebody painted over. The place where somebody--you?--nailed into plaster. Injuries, patches, scars--dark holes going in. There are cobwebs and cracks and fingerprints--notice--there are bubbles and seams.
The empty space where your chair sat. The place in the corner that took the bed. The echoes it holds of pleasure. The place where you held him. The tears. And even the ghosts of all your unremembered dreams.
The times you bent to put on your shoes, sat on the bed to take off your socks, sat on the bed and stared at the wall, rose and went out. Key in a lock.
The car is waiting, or the truck, or the van. It is full. It is half full, and the motor chugs, impatiently, a smell across the open screens. The white silence ticks and the house waits like a cocked ear.
But you cross the room and take the glass knob in your fist and turn it, open and pull like the end of a sentence. The stutter of the window shade, the splash of sun on the green carpet in the hall. Gently you close the door behind you, hiding the sunlight, putting the silence behind you, where it pools and waits, like memory.
You travel down the musty hall, touching the chair rail, imagining the stair’s dark tread, feeling the keys in your pocket, gathering speed.
