House of a Million Years

I don’t believe I have been asked, or if so, not in the way one remembers. The minds dog-eared moment, memory folded into a crease which cannot be ironed out. When another has-been broken-hearted person looks you in the eye and asks an unafraid question about your tender horrors. Precious terrors.

That kind of memory is maybe creased so deeply because all your bodies had been unseparated. Breath maybe even passes the sternum into areas of the body you don't need for being on watch. You can breathe all the way down, you know. They, the unafraid question asker, know that losing a nightmare is still a loss.

The light, or lack of, from night is not a ticking reminder of how much more there is to go. This question is a respite from the work of caretaking all who think they caretake you. You maybe even want to stay here forever, forever day, forever night, even forever four pm.  

Four pm which could not have been dreamed of in a worst nightmare before this.

One might notice, and I am one here, even in fiction, saliva has returned. Until you have tried to speak important words with a mouth obeying imagined sabertooth tigers descending to your clans cave, so dry that water would sit on top it’s cracked surface. In all the books that tell about why hands go numb and pupils dialate, no one tells me about saliva receeding so quickly like a tsnunami is about to come. Maybe that is the academia, that it happens when things happen that feel or look like the tsnumani is coming. 

I was delighted to learn about the people who faint at blood are genetically predisopsed better for survival because playing dead was an advantage when sabertooth tigers picked over lifeless bodies. I'd reccomend findind the actual research on the whole of that and not rely on how I just described it as it is in my mind. 

Yet, still no reason given enough to create an imagined scene on saliva drying up so fast. 

Anyway, if I were one and one was asked, my answer to the question of 'tell me all you have lost' would be; No one has ever lived there. 

The stories of those who have are told by those who are dying at every age. And so because we are dying at every age, we must worship something. 

We have learned enough of God or gods and pretend about them that they are the divinity we are supposed to look up at the sky for. 

We look up at the sky because it is supposed that they and it have all of what we want.

And we both resent and envy it and them while holding true that we do not truly believe they exist.

We do not talk about how foolish this makes us believe we are because to talk of it would be admission of the unspoken treason we all carry at every age and every moment that might be the one we are dying. 

In the house of a million years I wake up when my body does and let the light into every room

by pulling curtains to each side of clear windows. 

That is my first custodian task of the day. 

I light things to heat what one out of three or four or more will drink. I press a lever down to start the chain of steps which becomes what two out of three will drink. 

Pans are sometimes clean and ready, sometimes not. Life controls dishes left from the night before. Had it been many cut up vegetables, rice still married to the side of a pot soaking while we slept, then contents of boxes can be poured in bowls. 

Had the night before been single tortillas at a time. I cut or toast light things in the kitchen and heat what two of three will drink.

Melody is the closest we can be next to configured time. Tame and reminding us we cannot extend the present but we can guess the next to come. Sometimes we can hum a placebo.

And I lay back in bed with light now over everything. And my children and husband still sleep.

His moles on his back are as they’ve always been, time has had no effect. They remain

manifest and handsome. 

Faces so sweet and sweeter with closed eyes and easy mouths, tangled legs, tummies exposed. The youngest one opens her eyes without moving. A small moment passes and she smiles with her eyes. Worming towards me she lays her head on my stomach and closes her eyes again.

The rest of the day doesn’t matter when we will be here for eternity.

In the house of one lifetime never being enough, your body is always home and It has never

harmed me or us. I can make jokes about faith because it is not vital when forever safe.