The dark attic

The air smells of fruits getting ripe in the gentle autumn sun. The trees are full of apples and plums. I took a short trip to the village where my grandma used to live.

The old house is slightly crooked and beaten by rain and winds but defiantly still there.

I knew what I wanted to do long before I arrived there. I climbed the wooden ladder hidden in a small backroom, where grandma used to keep the pickles and jams, and there I was again. The attic of my childhood.

Full of darkness, old books, jars and all sorts of discarded objects. Always dead silent when I went up there during the day. At night, it came alive with noise and movement and wouldn’t let me sleep.

After all this time, the place kept its magic. It looks exactly the same. It smells exactly the same. That smell of old wood and of dust gradually accumulating over decades.

So much has changed outside. So much has changed in me. Still, standing here on the edge of the hatch, everything feels the same. As if I had just turned over a stone and found underneath a long lost object from childhood.

If I listen very carefully, I could maybe still catch a glimpse of the small talk and the laughter that I used to hear back then, in the distance. A reverberation of things that happened here and could never leave the place.

The fabric of time starts to fall apart at the seams and I find myself in a dark place where the flow of time seems to have slowed down to a trickle. Everything else outside was caught in the flow. I left this place a young boy. I return here weathered, broken and recomposed.

I know that I will come down this ladder and I will find myself in the flow again. There’s no other way.