You’ve crossed the globe to be here, yet you can’t take the last few steps. Stone fences speckled with age, salute your long shadow. The smell — musty slate roofs, moist dirt — stretches an arm and waits for you to take it. You remain motionless. Houses outlive us, you think, the paved streets too, those Roman slabs of granite offering the only permanence you can rely on. Does it matter if you’ve returned after two years or twenty?
The air picks up its daily noises and twirls them in a rhythm of a slow, uneven waltz.
You let your thoughts glide ahead as they’ve done thousands of times. First, through the labyrinth of cobbled alleys, then round the corner and up the incline tunnelled by ash trees you remember as shrubs. Your gait is a procrastination, stalling the moment when you’d reach the door that hasn’t been opened since your mother’s funeral. The key chews through the lock’s rust; the dark wood quivers under your touch as you push it open and the emptiness inside hits you with a single note, a moan.
You step inside, breathing in the scent of home only possible here. It burns at your throat and you rush to open the window. The voice of the city flows in. Ruins whisper their legends of dancing maidens and lovers lost. In the slant light, dust particles swirl and sway to the rhythm of that same waltz.
Your parent’s portraits are above the piano. Their eyes follow you as you pick the frames one by one and smooth the black ribbon across the top corner of each. Something shifts, it might be your imagination, but you feel warmth around you — the solemnity of the light softens, the blue in the window deepens and you hear, Welcome home.
The music is close now, real, an old hurdy-gurdy wheezing a waltz. One beat short, the other one dragging, lacking the will to dance — rum-da-a, doom-ta-a — like the ocean song in the land where you’ve come from, the place you now call home.
You trace your fingers over the oak table, rest them on the music box with a leg your dad mastered from a champagne cork, then over your mother’s coat neatly hung in the wardrobe. The burn in your throat threatens to dissolve.
I’m finally here, you think, do you know that I’m back?
A kitten appears as though from thin air — an amber-eyed, long-tailed kitten — and before you remember the opened window, it is purring at your feet, dancing around your ankles. It calls for your touch and when you kneel, its head fits perfectly in your palm. The caress you’ve been craving for flows into you.
The relentless rhythm doesn’t stop. Rum-da-a, it goes, doom-ta-a, or is it your grief echoing through this sweeping nostalgia that tricks you into believing that your parents knew, they understood how life happens, how it arrests you in a cell you can always get out of but never do.
And just as you touch your lips and their lips on the portraits, there’s another resounding moan, the entire tragedy of this strange ongoing waltz with its missing third beat, that has always been you.
The music illustrating this story is performed by Marnie Laird
Photograph by L. Karadzhov
Rostislava Pankova-Karadjova 