A strange summer’s chill passed over Melbourne this week, and upon this front my family arrived back in town.
They’d left me alone for ten days; ten days of peace and time; of thinking and of being nothing, existing in this house. ‘Creative seclusion’ you might say. In the morning I would enter my children’s rooms to open their curtains, and in the evening would draw them again before bed and in the time between I had to avert my eyes whenever I walked past their bedroom doorways. All the plans I’d made to clean their mess, sort through out-grown clothes, were put on hold because I could not tolerate puncturing the stasis.
So I kept to my bedroom, and the lounge room, these spaces the cat and I could bear to inhabit, with the static and blare of the television to keep us company.
And then they returned, my daughter with a tan and a light sunburn inlaid over that; my son, all elbows and exclamations (every other sentence out of his mouth is, “Oh. My. God!”) and now volume of the house is back to its proper equilibrium, with the laughter and the love, and I am content.
