Most of my memories of those days are cold. Cold and dark. The trees were all but barren skeletons whose bones were constantly rattling at the endless, dry winter winds that plagued the area from miles around. The previous days of youth, sunshine and cut grass were long forgotten, and the carefree feeling that we had felt during those times was replaced with a dark cloud that always hung in and fogged our minds. There was a numbness, too. A mechanical feeling to every move we made, like we could've cared less if we were stumbling into an endless, black hole. Because I suppose we already were.
Sometimes, when the whole world was sleeping, and the night was dark, and the air was silent, I would sneak outside and sit under the large oak tree that had been sitting in our mossy yard for centuries. I sat under it and I looked out over the horizon through the moonlight, fingering the stones on the ground and wondering if there was something I was missing. The world seemed incomplete to me, and I thought maybe the world was hiding something in the night that it wanted me to see. Maybe it was begging for someone to notice.
But there was no fantastical revelation that I ever experienced during those nights. If anything, they just made the world seem even more empty and broken than it had before.
And every so often, during the day time, I would notice the faint sound of the church organ playing from over the hill. It was a haunting sound. Like somebody waiting for something that would never come. Somebody sending letters to a relative that had actually died long ago.
Needless to say, I left that place as soon as my wings were full grown. I was no longer a fledgeling, which is when most of us leave the nest. So perhaps that was one of the reasons that I still carried that town everywhere I went. No. I suppose it wasn't the town. It was the feeling that the town had created. A shard of it had become lodged in my mind. It never left.
The only time I ever came back was the day of my father's funeral. Nothing had changed, except for the fact that the church's windows were boarded up, the chipped paint and rotting walls obvious signs of it's abandonment. I had a strong curiosity as to what I would find if I entered the church, because I had never set foot in it, even though all of the years of my childhood that i'd lived so close to it. I wanted to see that organ. That haunting, depressing organ. I never went inside though. It was too late in my life for fairy tales.
My father had requested to be buried under the oak tree, next to my mother, and next to my brother, so that's where I stood as his body was lowered into the ground. The mossy ground was covered in early morning fog, and in the sky hung large grey clouds. There were only five bodies there that day. It made me realize what a lonely man my father must have been.
His body had already been decaying for about 2 years when they found him. There was no will.
Later that day, when the priest had left, I chopped down the oak tree.
