Rooms

Click. 

Click. 

And there it was. Spread across the screen. Brick and tiles holding its breath for the next family. 

Click.

The table. 

It was familiar. The same table, they’d sat and laughed, chasing peas around plates. She remembers her oldest, sitting heavily on her knee laughing. His grandmother walking tickling ducks up each of his arms. His father beaming. 

Giggles and glee raining over the table woven through sips of wine, and carefree talk. 

The meals, perfect in size and taste. Never enough, for fuller, greedier appetites.

Scattered accents around one table, sharing tales and familial anecdotes

The rum. Splashing with generosity. The boom of tales woven through past realities, threads of embellishment of memory lapse and some intended creativity. Never an empty glass.

The fleeting touch of a hand, a brushed kiss. Now gone, just as tears have now dried. 

Drifting through the empty rooms, memories wafting, hazy and light. Dark and distorted. A maze of real and reimaged. 

The warmth is lost through the distance of time at that table, all together. A family. 

And now, at life’s end, the memories are all that are left, to press against the walls and live in the minds of those who had their friendship, or bore the brunt of their tongues. All have different faces for different people. Facades to fall and change, the chameleon of any life lived.  

Closing the window. The screen again blank. 

Leaving. 

Two lives gone and only memories left to drift around in an empty house, and saddened hearts. 

Gone.