ATTIC SPACE

selected from DiseaseDreams
a collection of moments
short and otherwise

I went up into the attic today. I have not been there for the longest of times and now here I am stood in the middle of it all. The trepidation is still with me; fresh with the memory of forcing the key to turn a complete turn through the stubborn rigidity of the lock, fresh with the memory of pushing the aged soft wood door made heavy by grating the oak boarded floor, fresh with the memory of seeing the low window letting thin tatters of light inside reluctant as always to enter any further than they must. The trepidation is still with me and with good reason.
I came to look for something, something I had lost. Any space this room once possessed has been squeezed from it by the constant addition of what may appear to be junk. Junk however is the one thing it is not, or at least it may be to other less attached people but not to me.
One day before I knew this room my memories became so complex and so many that the limited space on offer in my head became seriously insufficient to house them. With each new experience worthy of remembrance a piece of my past was displaced, shunted out, forgotten and lost forever. This never struck me as strange, but now I suppose it is since I am not very old at all and my life has not been particularly varied or interesting so as to merit these intricate memories that fall from my head. Wary of forgetting far too much to remain myself I began to store my memories in this room, filling decrepit shoe boxes, torn paper folders and broken box files full of experience to be locked away in this the highest room of the house: a room for future reference, a room for those times when I might need it.
I begin my search, moving dust, slowly thickening the air. The occasional tip of a tattered beam of light testing the interior through the bars of the window illuminates the particles roaming free, highlighting their eternal fall like the finest of snow or floating sand but not exactly quite like either. I watch their granular twinkle and begin to think I might be about to remember what I came in search of. The tentative tell tale light retreats and the air is just air once more. I shake my head. The thought has gone. And so I continue to search this aimless search. I hesitate amongst it all indecisive on which box to open which file to investigate. Moving spasmodically amongst the stacks and piles so as not to disturb their teetering balance it suddenly dawns on me that this room will not hold much more of my off-cast past. Most of the remaining space is dead space, middle space, space where nothing can be stored, space required simply to circumnavigate that already stored. Movement is already difficult, cumbersome at best. The room will not take much more. My elbow brushes the one predominant stack and it sways spilling a box from its distant apex. I freeze as it falls. I have the feeling that this stack may be the load bearing one that holds up the house and that the very room may crash down around me. The room does not move. The box hits the floor creating low-lying clouds as its contents scatter at my feet.
I kneel and sift through the scattered memories. There are photos and letters and receipts and train tickets and plane tickets and brochures and newspaper cuttings amongst other less readily identifiable things. Fingering each curled piece of paper I remember. After too much time caught up in reminiscence I remember that this is not why I came and begin to crush the spilt memories back into their box. When only a few scraps on the floor remain an edge frayed photo catches my eye with its monochrome colouration.
I pick up the photo and peer into the image. A girl stares out at me with shimmering grey eyes, which hint at mischief of a sexual kind. She is in a desert somewhere surrounded by rolling dunes with a caravan of camels forming a perfect line beneath the horizon far in the distance behind her. There is sand all around. A breeze has made it dance in swirls giving the image a gritty texture, or the illusion of it at least. I can see its movement clearly even though it is frozen in time. The image as a whole gives the impression that if one was to tilt the photo a little too far then sand would pour from it and refuse to stop. She is bright and vivid the girl, standing out from this world of grey sand, her long hair flowing with the breeze seeking the edge of the photograph. Her beauty is plain to see. Her wind dried face somehow enhancing the look of her, soft and delicate yet hard with confidence in a barren land. I do not recognise her. I do not know her. And I do not think I have ever been to a desert, surely I would remember. I do not know her, but wish that I did now of all times especially. Perhaps I knew her and she is just one more of those things I have managed to forget without effort, one more of those things to fall from my head.
A noise seeps up through the house from below, a noise like movement without presence. Intimate moment passed I squeeze the photo and remaining scraps back into the box, close and replace it at the peak of its stack. I have not even a vague notion of what I came for anymore. So I shuffle away from the disturbed dust of the room, scrape the door closed and lock it. As I walk the sway of the stairs back down into the house, back down into the world, my thoughts are occupied with what I will do when that room is full.
Inside behind the locked softwood door high up in the wooden underbelly of the roof a spider crosses its web and sets about encasing a struggling fly with silken thread.

© Spencer Dylan, July 2004

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