The room smelled just like the Catholic school I grew up in. It was a smell impossible to lock down, one I never thought I would smell outside of Glen Ridge – yet here I was states away, and the smell of old fabrics, settled air, and dark histories invade my nostrils as the songs of morning birds travelled my ear canal. The bright sky, the morning glow of spring filled my chest with sadness and mystery. A lifetime of running and I might of well had been in that church – those hallways – that classroom.
Before I completely regressed thirty years to my eight year old form, I got out of bed. The toss of the covers disturbing the settled air, I waded through its evaporating thickness and made my way to the kitchenette.
The sharp aroma of Arabica beans, ground and ready for their transformation into God’s semen brought me back to the present. Thirty-eight year old me in grey house slippers, white boxers – cotton with snowflakes so blue they were almost black, and an Old Navy t-shirt – retro advertising a wholesome game for kids as provocatively as a Gap owned company would allow. Some lines were only ever meant to be toed.
As the coffee begins to brew, I walked back down the hall. Past the second bathroom sink – its purpose I still hadn’t figured out, a side effect of traveling alone – and into the main bathroom. I sat to pee, surprised and a tad disheartened by the strips of blood in my underwear. Since I started birth control my bleeding had gone from light to almost non-existent. Once my IUD settled nicely in place, I had forgotten I could even bleed.
Life has a way of reminding you who/what you are, should you be so bold to forget. There was always something dreadful about the spring. Perhaps it was the impending Rebirth. Something everyone seemed to set their clocks and cleaning by – out with the aged, the cold, and the old; in with the young, the warm, and new. It wasn’t as though they knew what this newness was. What it threatened to be, what threatened to bloom. What darkness hid there in the shadows.
After all, the brighter the light, the darker the shadows. Who was to say what was being reborn?