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A letter to myself. As a child I wrote a letter to an old man. I was sure I had seen him creeping among cobwebs in the blue room in the old house, a faintly pencilled ghost without eyes. From behind a broken sewing machine he looked at me with those hollow things where eyes once were before they sunk away one terrible night. I shivered, as if he were a part of me I dared not see. I have felt cold all my life. Grandmother died in the night- I did not hear her. She had been keeper of the blue room where old things lived. A frail wedding gown hung on a hook; beside the pale light of the window it swayed like a limp ghost. On the last night she was sleeping soundly in the sick-room where nurses revolved like aliens in moon-white gowns. I kissed her cold cheek lightly. She blinked open her eyes. I saw her again in the coffin, white and tightly sealed. It was the first time I had seen death and it said nothing. I felt her in the blue room between the wrinkles of the wedding dress as the old man appeared- a vision she unraveled from a magic mirror in the plane of the dead who exist as so many trillions of reflections. As a child I could think clearly. So I wrote the old man a letter to tell him all I was and all I hoped to become when grown up my toes would reach to the end of the bed. I locked it in a box and went falling into the night. I enacted a little funeral with mud-suited stick-and-stone mourners and a toy priest I stole from Jesus. I buried it under a hedge. It has been twenty years -I have become faraway, but keep the key close to me. When I am old I will go digging and compare who I am to who I wanted to be. |
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