I'm in Grandma's basement, sitting on the guest bed closest to the nightstand. It's not really late yet, but I'm under the covers anyhow--it's cold down here. On the other guest bed to my left are stacks of folded laundry because we're leaving on Wednesday, so I washed all my clothes today in preparation. This means that my purple suitcase is sitting open and sadly empty. Actually, the whole downstairs in sadly empty. Or perhaps simply nostalgic. Do you know that in all my years of coming to Grandma's house, this basement has never changed? The beds are the same, the sheets are the same, the stuffed animals are arranged the same ways, the same movies and the same little trinkets on the windowsills, the dolls and empty bottles.
Everything is wonderfully constant here.
But I'm not--after all, it's impossible to stay 7, 10, or 15 forever. But sitting here I can see phantom versions of me all over this room and it's like watching my life in fast forward--there I am on the fold out couch, there I am at the puzzle table, here we are watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, there we are hiding in the closet, and now we're building a fort. There I'm reading a book, there I'm playing with stuffed animals, and now I'm arguing over who gets the "good beds." Do you know that these past two weeks have been the first time that I've ever been at Grandma's on my own? Before this, it was always with my cousins or my sisters, following the little chore schedule on the wall, leaving notes on the top of the bookshelf, and trying to convince the older cousins to play hide and seek with us younger girls.
I remember one of the last times, before we all got too old to go to Grandma's house for a week during the summer. It was just two of us that time--my cousin and I and we must have been around fifteen. In the middle of the night I got terribly frightened and I knew that my cousin was still awake, so I whispered, "Are you scared? Because the light from the window is makes the TV look freaky and I can't sleep."
"Actually, I'm sort of scared too." she confessed, "Want to turn on the lamp?"
So we turned on the lamp and I sat on my bed and she sat on hers and she pulled out this little book of psalms and Bible verses and she read aloud to me. We must have talked and read out loud for a half hour, maybe an hour, and then once I felt at ease, the lights went off again and we fell asleep. At the time, I supposed that she was as frightened as I was, but looking back, maybe she just pretended so that I wouldn't feel bad about being fifteen years old and scared of the dark. It seems like something she would do.
You know, about a month or two ago, while I was still at school, I had this absolutely terrifying dream. I was too unsettled to wake up my roommate, so I got out of bed at 5 in the morning and went to the empty lounge with my bible and my journal. I sat there for a long time, but after a while other people started getting up and moving around, so I finally went back to my room and the thought occurred to me that maybe not so much has changed since fifteen.
It seems like a lot of change, you know. So much change that I get frightened sometimes--am I the same person at all? But maybe not as much has changed, and maybe, after the lights go out, I'm still fifteen on the inside. Perhaps the dark is the great equalizer, one of only a few things that never change, never grow. The dark is sort of like my grandma's basement--perilously constant, always ready to trip you up with the same things that tripped you years before.
But no matter how much it trips you up, you can always count on it to be the same.
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