Home

The man came home but it wasn’t quite home anymore.

This was not an unexpected turn of events so the man just shrugged and dumped his bags on the floor and reached for the light switch.

The light didn’t make much of a difference.

The man stood in the doorway looking around, the familiar touching off only the vaguest feelings of belonging in him. Time and circumstance had done what they could to make this a place of ghosts and they had, in large measure, succeeded admirably.

The man closed the door and paused for a long moment as though waiting for something…was though waiting for someone to come out of the kitchen…out of the bedroom…out of the office…and then, when nothing happened at all, he picked up his bags and moved towards the bedroom door.

He thought he caught echoes of life…a child’s unapologetic laugh, a woman’s casual song, a man’s rueful grunting…but he dismissed them as indulgent, foolish memories and pushed them aside brusquely.

The bedroom… the still air perfumed with stubborn whispers of jasmine and Chanel No. 5, of Right Guard and Secret and that godawful musk cologne he used to think made him smell sexy…stirred little in the man either.

The man undid his tie and tossed it aside. He fell on the bed…the quilt he had dreamed under and wrestled upon and copulated under was there was there having seemingly waited patiently for his return…and looked up at the ceiling.

In the coolness of the bedroom, the man took deep breaths…taking in the air and its defiantly lingering perfumes as he tried to will himself to remember when this place meant something powerful and undeniable, something gloriously bittersweet and compelling, to him. He closed his eyes, laughing silently at his own hubris, and let his mind go quiet.

The night was what it was and the place was what it was. It was home but it wasn’t quite home anymore.