Why I Don't Like Coming Back to a Dark House

The short answer would be: due to existential angst. The longer one involves one late afternoon, when I was going home from school and the third square from the bottom of my apartment building (our kitchen window) was disquietingly dark. "Oh, it looks like there's no one home at your place, what are you going to do?"said Leonora, shooting me an inquisitive glance of slightly exaggerated concern. That was the time (probably in Grade 3) when, for some forgotten reason, I hung out with the cool kids -- girls with fancy names like Leonora and Andrea. A couple of times they came to my house to play with me. That was also the time when I carried the house key on a blue elastic ribbon around my neck, kind of like a necklace. I normally never had the need for the key in the afternoon since my parents were always at home when I got back from school -- but the key was always around my neck, "just in case." I remember the ribbon because in Grade 2, they came to take our individual enlarged photos, and when it was my turn to sit in the chair in front of the photographer, he looked at me and said, "Take that ribbon off, kid, you don't want it in the picture." I was a little confused, but dutifully took it off and asked a friend to hold if for me until the picture was taken. And there I still am in this photo, with my somewhat spaced out milk front teeth, wearing a dark-golden cardigan, with no blue ribbon hanging around my neck -- the photo was later framed and my mother kept it on a chest of drawers. But that afternoon, as I walked towards my darkened home heavy-hearted, the key was dangling on the blue elastic around my neck, reminding me that I would soon have to go through those horrible few minutes of unlocking the door to a silent apartment and facing the ill-boding emptiness. The terror of the situation truly lay in those few moments -- and, in fact, I can't even remember how this episode ends, whether my parents were at home but simply had neglected to turn the lights on in the murky zone between night and day, or whether they had indeed gone somewhere and came back soon after me.

What I do remember is this strange fear as I was approaching our apartment building, the kind that takes over your whole being. The kind that brings into question your entire existence, and leaves you short of breath because you don't have an answer or a solution. I remember it well because I was its prey many times in childhood -- and always about the same thing: if for some reason my parents were late after a day at work. They would usually show up between 3:00 and 3:30, and when the clock on the wall in the hall went beyond that magic window of time, I would get anxious, and would strain all my being in order to pick up the first, distant sounds from the belly of the building, indicating that one of them was approaching, and sending waves of relief through my body. I would glue myself to the front door, and, transforming into a giant, sophisticated ear, I'd start a listening journey down the staircases and landings (hunting for the reverberations of the familiar steps: my mother's slow, laborious ones, or my father's determined, springy ones), by the two elevators (the mechanical, mournful whizzing of either may have meant that my father was on the way -- my mother never took the elevator), by the metal bars in the railings on all three storeys that separated me from the groundfloor (including the one missing bar in the railing of the first floor), past the mailboxes at the entrance, and out the main door, where on summer mid-afternoons small kids from the building spent lazy hours, their shrieks and babbling trickling in thinly from the distance, together with faint echoes of the life passing down the street.

What was it that I was afraid of? What was I imagining? That something unspeakable had happened to my parents, and they were not coming, and I was doomed to stay motionless there for eternity? Or that they had simply forgotten me and our home, and I was abandoned? It's hard to tell. Above all, there was that devastating feeling of suddenly being alone, severed from some organic part of me, left unprotected and small, unable to read meaning into the momentarily changed world, and crushed by the overwhelming question beginning to form in my head, "And what now?"

I am not in Grade 3 any more (haven't been for a long time), and I left my parents' home a lifetime ago, it seems -- and yet, there are moments when my body remembers and recognizes this anxiety of a child whose world is precariously endangered because the parents are missing... Some things don't change much, do they. We only learn better how not to show that all we want to do in moments like those is cling to that door, ear painfully pressed to it, listening for the saviour-sound.

And that's why I don't like coming back to a dark house.