Dust and Memories  − March, 2003

Risking broken ankles and spiders, Clint and I fought through the piles of discarded clothes and furniture that had been left, forgotten, over the length of the staircase. When we reached the top, I turned and looked back the way we'd come, but I could no longer see the door we had entered below. Whatever the hell we'd come up here for had better be worth it, I thought.

A beam of sunlight from the room's only window cut through the dust and lay hot and bright in a square on the floor in front of us. As we went through the varous pieces of history that littered the place Clint told me that when he was just a baby he and his mother used to live up here. Traces of life covered everything. Open makeup lay strewn across a cracked vanity, and I could imagine Clint's seventeen year old mother sitting in front of it, putting on her face while baby lay asleep in the next room. I picked up a magazine that was draped across the back of a chair, its pages withered and unread. I ran my fingers over the yellowed paper and tossed the magazine onto an unmade bed.

My gaze crawled across old cassette tapes, posters clinging eternally to yellowed walls, and old forgotten clothes from a time before I was born. A white bandanna hung limply from an open dressor drawer, still tied in the back where someone had been wearing it. Disquiet crept down my spine and tingled in my fingertips. It had been nearly fifteen years since anyone had lived here, yet it felt as though the occupants had merely stepped out for a moment, maybe to grab something to eat.

Another unsettling thought had been working its way into my mind. This was a teenager's room, not too unlike my own, and it was here that Clint's parents cast off the shroud of childhood and began the relentless struggle that is being an adult. Troy, Clint's dad, would work while his mother, Lisa, stayed home and watched Clint. As I looked around the room I could see the fledgling family that spent all of their time here, and wondered briefly if Clint remembered any of it.

I was snapped out of my musings by the sound of Clint's voice. He called to me from the closet he was squatting in, and I went over to him, stepping around the abandoned junk at my feet. "I found it," he said, sticking a yearbook in my hands. I leafed through its slick pages until I came to one that was folded at the top. I scanned the page and saw that one of the pictures had a black circle drawn around it. It was a girl of maybe sixteen or seventeen, and she looked the same then as she did now. In heavy ink scrawled next to her picture were the words I love you, Lisa. - Troy.