Greenbreau Place

These walls laid quietly for me.  They were patient, did not speak and they never looked at me the way you did when I was a child.  That is why I'm here and you're not.  I've come to lay on this bed of small timbers and twine, it has served me better than you.  I mention that the cleaning lady was here again, leaving her trail of straw parcels left behind from an old pine broom as she stabs at these old musty corners every Thursday morning.  Her tendency to lay out one of my dresses outside of my armoire reminds me of how you laid my clothes out for school, so that I would know what you wanted me to wear.  And I wore each outfit as you suggested they be.  The cleaning lady does not know me, nor does she know if that old dress still fits me, but she preferred this one and desired it to be noticed.  I felt it a patriarchal gesture.  Her breath smells of spirits that have soaked up her early lunch of bread and heavy, exotic cheeses.

The room stays cool and efficient. The windows are my release of gloominess and dark hearted victories, I couldn't wait to look out upon the other rooftops to see where my emptiness would end.  I am here and that's all that matters.  To sleep. Or perhaps I've come to cry for my childhood abandoned and how you swept me under the carpet everyday. I'm alone know and free to feel.

Well, I made sure this room did not have a carpet, I preferred its old wide planks of hard ash wood that reveal the lines from an old tree that once knew the world.  Perhaps it stood in a forest among the castles of Greenbreau-Lachrymary and never expected to be here displaying the shadows of the birds on my sill.  Who would have known how this tree would ever meet me and catch my tears as they fall onto its tenacious surface?  Like the ash tree, I must have lived 300 years ago.