Moving on
Uploaded by lil_carlie on Mar 28, 2005
I scan the room, my drunken eyes taking it all in. I collapse onto a lounge and a cloud of dust surrounds me, making an already hazy room, simply a mass of grey-brown shapes. I lean back giving my exhausted limbs time to breathe. Like an ancient tree I eerily creak and groan as I move: relaxing finally.
Scattered around the room, memories almost forgotten, remind one of lives once had. A yellowing photograph hangs on the wall. A moment in time captured forever. The smiling children almost look as if they’re screaming upon looking hard enough. Warning the viewers of the desperate times ahead, trying to warn of what the future holds.
If only we’d looker harder…
Littered with old newspapers a coffee table sags under the weight. Bold font now fading. Obituaries in the hundreds: families mourning their losses.
‘War Sweeps Through a Nation,’ they all state the same thing, yet we seemed unable to learn from our mistakes.
A patchwork quilt, now ridden with moth holes, hangs over the back of a chair, a family heirloom discarded. Generations carefully sewed into it their happy times, birth dates, anniversaries, the coming together of a family… Now limply draped over the back of a dusty settee, doomed never to be finished, it surrenders itself to time.
I doze, trying to lull myself to sleep with familiar smells. But a thick blanket of dust suffocates the room, making it foreign to me.
Looking down, I remember my hand clutches a bottle enclosed in a wrinkled, brown paper bag. I take a swig; the sweet juice warms me, helping me forget. Once again I lean back and let myself relax, I take another swig and close my eyes, slowly I drift off.
I wake to the sound of an explosion; instinctively, my arms go over my head, to protect my face and trembling in fear I dive off the settee and onto the floor, like a prairie dog running for the safety of its hole. I wait, expecting to hear glass shatter and feel the spray of it on my back but nothing happens. I remain on the floor, waiting for the sirens to start, again nothing happens. I linger there, afraid to move.
Sun rays stream through the window, specs of dust twinkle as the light hits them, and they slowly float around the room. With a heavy head, I look around. The window...