hayley white

I slowly wake up, one of my arms is so cold the kind of cold where you get pins and needles, I pull it quickly back under the covers. Not before the cold spreads and creates a cold isolating feeling in my chest, small panic in a small body, tight and tired, hot with emotion and need for love but cold with yearning and isolated with emotional restraint.

 

It is dark. A yellow orange glow coming in from the gap in the curtains. The street light pushing into the bedroom invading the space with urban light. A cat calls to its mate in the distance, a car screeches to a stop, voices shout and car revs and is gone again. I can almost see the tire marks on the camber of the road, the exhaust fumes and the acrid smell of working brake pads.

 

There is laughing and clatter of cutlery from below. It is where the adults are. Shuffling around each other the dance of familial distance. Disharmony which only happens when parents worn down by a hard life. Teenage offspring full of ambition and driven to create their new independent life held back in limbo of parent past expectations. A time, which should be filled with joy, waited out as if a prison sentence. Opportunity of life held on a back burner, being cast in the opinion of the parent until life can be independant and designed as its own. It would be years before I gained this perspective but now I look back I know it as well as see and smell it - the desperation of independence and the injustice of living by someone else’s rules. Regardless of where these rules come from and the exact shape of them, liberal, hippy and loving, classist and bound, strict and oppressed.  The need for ownership and freedom from the family bound bonds.

 

I smell hot buttered toast and this begins to warm the cold in my chest. A rare burst of laughter floats up the stairs. It brings another waft of melted butter. Tumbling up stair by stair. Seeping like smoke under the crack in the door into my room. It hits the orange glow of street lights coming in from the window. It bursts. Laughter and a cloud of warm butter scent evaporates in my room, leaving behind the sense of happiness and contentment.

 

I get out of bed trying to encase myself in the scent of butter and laughter. It has gone. Faded into the carpet and walls. I creep on to the landing and down a few stairs.  Tentative and keeping to the long rectangular shadows cast by the bannisters. The bannisters are not round and smooth but angular, cold and hard. Dripping with long dried white gloss paint. Hard and cold to the touch, like the shadows cast on the stairs. I sit nestled into the shadows and listen to the adult conversation in broken words. Blunt and likely inconsequential but filled me with a deep longing to be part of this world, the adult world. The TV is always on too loud.