Sasquatch to the Moon

40: Nice Room

LMAO sorry guys I completely forgot to post

ROCKET

Eventually I do have to end the conversation out of sheer exhaustion and how burnt out my brain is from switching suddenly and rather violently back to Czech after ten full years of only using it with Mom. And from talking about exhausting things, and from taking in so much information all at once.

The staircase is thinner than I remember as I work my way upward, approaching the hallway at the top. I stop and look at the wall, a photo hung up of my parents at their wedding. I look at my dad, mildly amused to find that the picture just looks like me.

I put my hand on the wall and drag my finger across the wallpaper, the same ugly floral pattern Mom was working on finding a replacement for when she left.

I don't look up, I keep my head down until I turn sideways, looking down at my bare feet, framed in the opening to a door, the door, however, shut.

I lift a hand, setting it on the brass knob, then push. It creaks on it's way open and I'm standing, a foot taller, ten years older, staring at my old room.

I can barely keep myself put together enough to step inside, placing my travel bag on the hook that held my backpack so I could do homework in here. Everything is clean.

There's drawings all up all over the walls. Action poses and pencils and pens and I even appear to have used red crayon in a few of them. I gave up drawing when we moved, but looking back at all of these, stuck up on the walls, I had talent. Quite a lot of it, actually.

I push open the door to the closet, looking in, spotting my old board games up on the shelf, binders next to it. Hung up are only a few things, a suit coat, two pairs of jeans I don't think I'd fit in if I tried as hard as I could, a couple graphic t-shirts I remember absolutely loving and wearing to death. There's a hoodie from the IIHF, five years before I attended for myself. There's a pair of shorts, my beat up sneakers in the bottom.

I guess I didn't realize that everything would really still be here, in the same spots. I thought he would've moved on, changed things, used this room for something else.

But it lies as is. My sheets are fresh, my pillow somewhat fluffed, my desk is clear, my closet is organized.

I guess it was like mourning a death, two deaths. A father who lost his son due to divorce but was still in contact with him would have changed things, maybe made the room more age-appropriate for if he came to visit.

A father who was cut off, a father with a lost son, he would've kept everything the same as the very hour he left, preserving a memory of something he won't get back. Preserving his son as he was when he was lost. Preserving what they remember knowing new memories aren't an option and memory in itself is so fragile that you lose it as time draws on. So you keep what isn't memory, what is real. Because real things don't change so dramatically, cannot alter because of your own mind.

So he kept my room exactly the same. He kept my drawings, he kept my goalie stick, he kept the pictures of us, he kept the action figures on the windowsill, he kept the jersey hung up on my wall. He-

I stop and stare at the little figure on my shelf, stepping toward it, my hand reaching out and wrapping around plush before I can stop myself.

It was the one thing I was most destroyed about losing in the exact moment, though no thirteen year old boy would admit out loud he still needed his favorite stuffed animal. It was the thing that made me cry on the way to the airport, not losing my family, that hadn't settled in and wouldn't for a few years, not losing my country, that either, none of the big things.