The House That Fades Away My dad always says it was a good house. “It was good to us,” he tells me when I reminisce about the shady street it lives on, the neighbors, or the memories. I know it was good to us and I believe that. It’s just hard to believe that we were good to it. We were the ones who left it. Packed up and drove away. Days before we left it for real we weren’t really living there. I can remember the blurred houses next door and the objects in the rooms. I quizzed myself on the plane the day we left, thinking that if I could hold onto the exact way it was then, it would be with me forever. And yet, somehow, that house, our house, still fades away. It hurt to leave it. It hurt like there was a hole in my heart and when I think of my old life too much it feels like the sun is in my throat. A massive lump, making my eyes burn and start to water to put out the flames. It’s hard to be homesick for a place you can’t go back to. In the pictures, it all seems so clear. The white panels and steeped driveway. The red door and pool in the backyard. In my mind, the memories start to have water stains. What was on the walls and how we used to live. After a while, even the sounds start to sound warbled, like they are songs on the radio playing miles out of range. Sometimes in my mind I get on a plane and fly 2,970 miles to that street, Canton Drive, it looks the same as it did when I left. Past the tennis courts and the long steep driveways, past the rose bushes and the massive house across the street. In my mind, I pass the house where I found a lizard skeleton in the yard and the next day it was gone, past the house with the bamboo along the side, past my mom’s first house where she and my dad lived together. In my mind I drive around the cul-de-sac where the neighbor did tai-chi. I drive back down the road and the gate that always used to break is already open. The tires squeal just as they used to and I pull into the garage driving over the imprint of my sister’s feet in the concrete. In my mind, I will myself to unlock the door and step into the house that was mine. The house that was once so familiar to me and yet, now could be unrecognizable. I take a journey in my mind of what could still be if I was back there. What gets to me still is the unknown. The fact that I don’t know what the walls now look like or what furniture accompanies the rooms. I could drive past my street every day and never go up because knowing that I am so close and that house isn’t mine would be worse than not knowing what it was like now at all. So it remains, the house that fades away. Ellie Grimmett ’25
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