As a foreword, so to speak, I would like to make it known what sort of things I will be posting. To be brief, there will most likely be a little bit of everything - fiction, nonfiction, journal entries, what have you. The goal is simply to write.
This first piece is fiction, it is short, it is incomplete, and it is called The House:
The house wasn’t the same to her anymore. She couldn’t describe to herself why, but the change was real, a tangible difference that hung in the air and rested on everything. The closest equation she could make was that the house, and everything in it, all the old familiar rooms and objects, had once been a dear friend, but time and space had estranged them from one another so that their meeting again was less like a reunion and more like an awkward reintroduction. It wasn’t warm, congenial, or reminiscent. It was hollow, empty, the shell of what had been – all of the structure and appearance, none of the life. All this was strange to her, but, stranger still, was how resigned she was to it all. There was none of the wishing she felt something for the old home, no nostalgia for nostalgia. All that was left was an insufficient melancholy, too immature to be connected with any ache or longing for anything. It was a self-aware melancholy. It knew itself, but did not know what it was, or how it had come to be. Melancholy is melancholy, there is nothing more. She knew it, had known it for years, but as she tread slowly through the house, peeking in at the doors, touching all the old things, it subdued her with such pulsing determination that she could not ignore it.
- Benjamin Beam -
