It Will Come Again

It will walk in through the door: insistent like a robber, but passive like a hungry, distant son. It will eye down the silverware kept loose in drawers while stopping to collect picture frames, with the implication that all frames in the house were vacant, void of any resemblance of a memory. It will be foolish and leave Its fingerprints on the windows that hold the manicured lawn with their TV model hands; on the ridge of the coffee table that was gnawed on by dogs, like the edge of a stamp from an untouched letter; or on the lamp with the bunny painted on the vase and the bulb that was reluctant towards the ignition knob, It knows this is the case. It will lazily raid the fridge and cabinet of anything remotely essential, leaving the spices, herbs, and condiments. The luxury of these items is no longer of importance when by themselves. It will lurk in the stairwell and take two feet for each step as if It is a baby discovering how to climb the stairs without Its hands. It will creep into every room of the house, like a corpse-ly stench or a greedy fire. It will stay only for a while, in the bedroom of a daughter who lives as a mother, wife, and teen; she is all at once but in intervals of abundance and emptiness. Its eyes will dart between all the flakey blemishes and pushpin pores of the wall’s blue bodice, depressed by its nakedness. It will only glance, for barely a moment of a moment, at the dusty mirror. That is all It will grant Itself, as vanity is purposeless to It now. It will lay tensely on the bed without being covered by the fairy-patterned sheets, rejecting any form of prior innocence. Childhood is no longer a word understood by It as if it’s from a different language that is otherworldly, linguistically, and phonetically impossible. It will leave with a trinket: the familiar air of nostalgia, but not quite as filling, like the first bartered meal a student has in college, nothing like their mother’s holiday cooking. We could call this air yearning, however; this too, implies that there was once a thing to yearn for. Sentimental, possibly; no, too joyful. Maybe this air is just nothing, that kind of nothing that we say that no “something” can describe. So, we leave it at nothing. It will leave with this nothing clutched in a fist, almost secretly, trying to evade the question of what It holds because It does not want to answer. It does not want to utter another empty promise. It will walk out through the door frame; confidently like a ghost before their birth, and regretfully like a closed mouth full of words.