Two Different Worlds

On the outside looking in, everything seems to be fine; maybe Sandy did not have a chance to stop here. The house is still in place, grey, with a black front door, and a thick brick path leading to the back entrance. The back entrance is what we have used since I was a child; along with the outdoor dinner table and outdoor shower; we always managed to spend most of our time outside.

Using the right side of my hip to bust through the hunter green door, a sense of shock and reality hits me like an eighteen wheeler truck. It’s me, my mother, my father, and little sister, surrounded by pillars, pillars, three feet of water and more pillars. It seems that these pillars were the only thing keeping this house in place, but I could not wrap my head around it with the smell of mold that was traveling through my nose and into my brain; I found myself losing brain cells by the millisecond. However, the pillars felt weak, there was much more keeping this house standing than meaningless pieces of wood.

I watched my mother’s pupils dilate, they were creating such active commotion that I could see her childhood and greatest memories flash before her eyes. Running her hands through her short, jet black hair to collect herself, she grabbed everything she could rescue; pictures of the family, of my sister and I, of gram. She managed to grab the few decorations that had survived the storm, and a few throw pillows just to hold for a sense of hope on our ride home. She also stumbled upon the one book that did not have one scratch or tear at all, Ortley Beach. I never read the book growing up, I had always thought it was used for show; my mother has a tendency to use functional objects as decorations. The way she held the book so tightly against her chest, left me with the impression that she would no longer be using it as a typical embellishment.

“Come on girls, time to go back home,” my parents said to my sister and I as we inhaled and exhaled slowly, taking photos in our head every time our eyelids blinked. As my parents left the temperature dropped lower and the pillars suddenly appeared weaker.

 I look down at the fifty year old kitchen tile; I take a mental picture of the brown stain that has been a mystery since summer 2004. I snap another one of the day bed, located across from the oven in the kitchen. I see four of us cousins squeezing into the double bed just to have a place to sit in this four room memory. My last picture is of the wooden picnic table in the breeze way, the long, cheery brown table that seated twenty of us at a time, and still managed to hold endless pounds of pasta and family arguments. I inhaled for a few solid seconds more, trying to plant the smell of the kitchen in my head forever.

I lean against a pillar, as my sister exits the house, a piece of the roof tears off and sinks into the water beneath me. I suddenly began wishing to myself that I had just stayed outside where the only thing missing were my beach chairs and annoying cousins. This was it, for all I know these pillars could collapse any second and the remainder of this house could be brushed away into the back of a disposal truck, gone just like that; kind of like magic.

Before leaving, I stand in the breezeway, my favorite room of the house; I look outside through the windows, starring at my parents in their white Toyota Rav 4 truck. I imagine myself each summer in the opposite position, I see myself waiting in the back of my parents car as they took their time to get ready, I was always so anxious to leave, but not today. From the inside looking out, it was an entirely new world; a world in which sacrifice, emotions, and memories are going to come into effect.  

Slowly, I got into the truck and we drove away, away from what used to be. This was definitely going to be a bumpy ride; a ride headed into the direction of something that has yet to come. I closed my eyes for the ride, making sure I didn’t look back.