Upon returning home

It was like my bedroom had become the proverbial grandmother's attic. I walked in slowly; I'm not sure whether it had more to do with the challenge of finding a decent pathway among the clutter or whether it was the strange pang of sadness and distance that somehow obligated me to be respectful, the way one might feel at the funeral of someone they had never met but that a close friend had known quite well. It was as though I paused to pay homage to all of the memories, many of which were not even my memories, that lingered amidst the torn cardboard boxes, plastic shopping bags, cobwebs and various other items. Some of them were mine, the stuffed animals who might have smiled at me (although I wondered if they even recognized me after all this time), the half-empty bottles of hairspray and hand lotion on the dresser, the high school graduation shots, remnants of college entrance essays I'd started over and over again, a letter I'd written but never delivered to my friend as she was dying. Many of the things were not mine, the purse with the ruffles, the portrait of my parents' wedding, my Mom's wedding dress (not from the same wedding). And still there were things that may well belong to no one, the moths poised eerily in their final position before death, their wings turning slowly to dust, the dusty boxes piled up inside an old laundry basket, the shoes I'd given to my Mom last summer but couldn't remember if she'd kept them or given them back. Everything was covered in the same undiscriminating dust.