annoyingly so, and I imagined the moths flocking around it, slamming
into it, adding an erratic and soft rhythm to the white noise.
From my roof, I saw myself on that porch; from that porch, I saw
a hundred scenes.
I saw a firepit in the yard, and a woodpile near the forest’s edge.
I saw countless summer nights spent by that fire. Whether it was me, or
anyone else, I knew it didn’t matter. A guy at the
fireside, and a girl...but not together, never together, no matter how hard
they tried, not with all of the emptiness of this place between them.
I saw gray morning after gray morning, cold wetness of the dew
coating the deck and the
grass, soaking anything that moves. And so everything is still but the
blanket of clouds, which drift so slowly that they might as well be still
too.
In those imagined nights on the porch, I’d wait for whoever
owned the house to come out, to sit with me, to enjoy my company; I’d
never seen the person who owned the house before, and so they never
came.
Nowadays, we don’t spend much time on his porch. Come to
think of it, I haven’t seen most of his house. I imagine it is as plain as the
parts I’ve seen – bare walls, sterile surfaces. Every wall is a blank canvas
for casting shadows, and as a result the house always seems dark. It’s as
if the whole world doesn’t have light enough for so many rooms and so
much emptiness. Over the porch we prefer the basement – the darkness
more familiar.
Josh was back a few minutes later. I noticed him just before he
pushed his way out of the mass, on the opposite side of the field. He
exited near the left end, hopped the opposite fence, and walked around,
back to me.
“I’m not sure what to say,” I told him.
“I’m not sure what I’d answer,” he responded.
Back in the parking lot, we climbed into the car. Josh told me
he’d seen my parents and my sister. I told him we’d seen everybody.
We drove back in silence. We were stopped at the same
intersection on the way back. I looked to the left, down the long street,
109