Catching Shadows

Accustom to tormented soldiers, nosy neighbours, well, they were extraterrestrial.

Reluctantly, I was offered the key. Left with just a warning and some expected bafflement. "Some places can never be warmed up, the bleak, the chilly, stale hauntings upon the board house, well they're too heavy to be lifted."

Weeks previous, I'd strolled through my old city, once where I serenaded. Seduced, socialis  ed and charaded about. That day was cold. Sharp winds with needlepoint ice, stabbing all pedestrians without mercy through its cutting air. Accompanied by a stubborn fog, it was committed to blinding the pavements promenade. Yet the streets, own musky, smoky, stench was familiar. I, oddly safe, safe for the first time even without my ton weight armor. Enduring, life's bitter gifts of substance.

Remembering in stride and momentarily, I had survived the chaos, the battles and mysteries of war.

My walk was beginning to beacon on the aimless, til I yielded at the frontier of the old eerie boarding house. Cross, bitter, stern and concrete. Gaping at a forlorn, tattered sign; For Sale.

Yes here, yes here, I could start again.

So, as the bewildered neighbour offered the key, fearfully, hesitantly. As an inexperienced shooter would offer a loaded gun.

The idle gossip, the ghost stories, the practicalities, none of it would deter me. They could only assure me. And anyway, continuing my residential endeavor, conformity was now forever lost in meaning.

I understood, yet this neighbour could not understand me. Here is where I strangely belonged.

This building, this ancient board house. Which housed many lost souls and ghosts of its own times past. It was once invisible to me. In youthful times, so grey, so camouflaged, so damp, blooming only to blend to the ground beneath us.

Now, now it was a home, or a barracks, a shelter, an unsettling place for me to camp. Haunted, harrowing, yet for me a homely hospitable disarray.

Through the first night here, I would suffer the tossing, the turning, my minds utter tribulations. Unrelentingly, unrepentantly, unforgivingly. And without trials of their own.

The second, tired, giving in. Surrendering to the remnants. The shrills left in my memory of screaming battlefields. Friends fighting, failing and fading.

Though on my third night, my memory relieved. Alleviated by hearing the aggressive banging and colliding of the doors. Howls and cries of the present, shrieking through the windows and up through the weakened floorboards. Catching shadows dancing on the dreary walls. Ghosts, phantoms, spirits of a newfound breed.

A forgotten candle tilts, collapsing down upon the jaded carpet. Eloquently, it falls mystically, almost playfully down from the mantelpiece. Resurrecting from my makeshift bed, I strike a match, grab some kindling and light the old fire.

I stand, firmly addressing the house. "Okay, let's warm this place up.."

And there was a silence. A silence that listened. And I slept that night. Slept with a new peace, an odd peace, amongst a new nighttime unsettling.