Balance

The devastation is not immediately obvious, the change in the landscape is not certain. We stand, clutching our bags, in fron of what was once as solid as a rock, and look, ruminating on what we are leaving behind.
The Pole Star of the family has shifted. We two are drifting off-course.

Sadder than I thought I was, I take the last bag and stare one last time up at the bedroom that used to be mine, that will soon have someone new in it to tolerate the cracking plaster, the south-facing windows that turned the room into a summer sauna, the view and the cupboard with the heating pipes that my mum, the Christmas before I was born, had to sit by with a hairdryer, defrosting the pipes in the kind of cold December that doesn't happen any more.

The time we got burgled. The constant fear I had of a tree falling and destroying the glass roof of the conservatory, and the confusion as to whether that did happen, whether my young mind muddled it out. The much-loved pets buried in the back garden. The falls down the stairs. The parties and the stains on the carpet. The time that the handles were removed from our doors so we couldn't close them.

As the Pole Star lifts and takes root within each of us and we go our seperate ways, the house seems to shift, giving up the ghost. Like the mythical lightening of the body when the soul leaves it, the insubstantial but also so heavy memories bank themselves in us. The house stares, glassy-eyed, back, offering nothing any more.

Taking a piece of the Pole Star each, he and I split, depart. I feel in my back pocket for my keys, and feel a jolt to my heart of panic when my keyring only has one key on it. The key to my flat back in London. The keys to this place are gone. The chapter is closed. The day is ended.

A rented flat. A series of rented flats. A series of bin liners and boxes and my trailing roots, like a lone jellyfish drifting out at sea, with nothing but a big blue expanse ahead.

I am not scared. I have not called this house my home for a good few years, and I'm ready to make my own. But as I walk down the hill, mentally ticking off all the change-of-address forms I needed to fill in, considering a little more what kind of flat I would like to move to next, and that maybe I should speak to that mortage adviser again on Monday, I mentally scrub the forever-remembered phone number and the postcode I could recite on my deathbed from my mind. I grow up in one quick instant when I realise the only permanent address I now have is myself, and the memory bank of my own brain.

The jellyfish drifts off, trailing its roots.

NB An unsuccessful submission to 1000words.org.uk, where every story is inspired by a picture. I chose this one. My parents are selling the house I grew up in. I think the problem with this story was I tried too hard to make the picture fit my story. I did it before in an 1000words submission with greater success. I'll post that one another time.