It was always music, and not the sense of smell, that brought her memories closest to the surface of her conscious mind. Her playlists acted as time machines as she felt herself transported back through her memories and experiences to those moments when her inner soundtrack played. One song could stir-up the past in an explosion of emotion and a visceral recollection of a singular event in her life, or it could bring back the thoughts, sensations and perceptions of a period of time, a string of individual events that were all intricately tied together through the temporal tapestry of music.
She sat in a quiet alcove, earbuds carelessly pushing into her sense of the present, and was suddenly slapped across the face with the past, whipping her attention from the here and now and dragging her back 5 years in fractions of seconds. The library before her faded from her mind and was replaced by an image of a crumpled heap of desperation practically prone on the polished pine-wood floor of an empty room—the largest of the house—no indication of the furniture that used to be present excepting the tumbleweeds of dust and cat hair that had long collected where the vacuum hose could never quite reach. Beside her lay a dustbin, caught mid-sweep and half full of the remains of the life that had once been lived in this room.
Her stomach summersaulted within as she sat up, absorbing the scene before her eyes: an empty house occupied solely by ghosts of past conversations and the soft plaintive voice sounding through the stereo speakers. She wiped the tears—both shed and unshed—from her eyes with the back of one dirty hand and reminded herself that to live was to move on, to get past this moment in time, to never be conquered by the actions and attacks of others.
Unaware how much time had passed since the moving truck had pulled away, she knew only that time seemed to extend out interminably in the darkness before her causing waves of panic to ebb and flow through her mind. Swallowing back pride and nausea in equal measures, the woman got to her knees and then her feet, walking out of the room to locate the last remaining clock in the house, the electric blue light glowing from the kitchen stove.
One hour. She had one hour before she needed to collect the children from their grandparents’ house and bring them to a newly father-free dwelling. The baby would understand nothing but the raw emotion dripping from his mother’s heart; the child, however, she would know. She would realize and the mother needed to clean the room that had once held father’s computers, TVs and gaming equipment so she could encourage her daughter to create a new space designed just for the children, a playroom in which all of their joys could obscure the memories of past tension.
Walking back into the empty room, the woman picked up the broom and swept the remnants of the past into piles to be collected and thrown out.
hocscripsit 