Magic House

We moved to Olympia, my family.  We bought an huge, derelict but gorgeous, ornate Victorian house north of Priest Point Park, right by the water.  It had been raining incessantly, and the sound had overflowed into our yard.  It wasn't yet lapping at our sprawling porch, but the rain was not going to stop soon; the sky was knotted with black clouds that seemed to be tearing at one another.  From the kitchen, where the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the glistening water, it appeared that we were on a boat.  When I vocalized that observation, the whole house began to shift and sway as though it were true.  My parents began considering tearing down the old house and building a new one further down on the property, but because the further from the water you got, unlike almost everywhere on earth, the lower you went, this posed the threat of the water cascading over the highest point and completely swallowing the new house.  The gnarling and twisting forests clinging to the steep hills, cut through with zig-zagging roads and occasionally interrupted by cleared lots for gardens or small pastures, were dark and beautiful.

I took a lover.  He was an artist who lived in town.  Our relationship was inspiring and blissful, save for the private knowledge that I carried of his death.  I knew the moment he would die, to the hour.  He was bound for New York City to do a show, but the night before he left he wasn't feeling well.  I tried to make the very most of what I knew would be our last moments together.  I asked him to make love, but he insisted that he felt sick and needed to rest.  I held him through the night, trying to keep awake to experience every second, but eventually drifted off.  When I awoke, he was gone, and so were the things he was meant to take to New York.

I called his best friend to see if he knew where he was, and was lead around on a verbal goose hunt.  Unable to ask blatantly if my lover had died without sounding insane, I was informed plainly that my lover was simply in New York, as planned.  But I wasn't given a number to reach him at there, and while my love's mother and sister were near by (for suspicious reasons), I wasn't allowed to speak to them, and half of the questions I asked were greeted with confounding, bizarre sarcasm, climaxing at a point where, after having been locked in this strange telephone dance for at least an hour, he asked me, "who is this anyway?"  Several mutual friends of ours approached me around this time, curious about the strange conversation I had been sucked into, and they responded to his claims that he didn't know me with a collective: "Well, tell him we don't know who he is either."

Disturbed, but not too much, I wound up in some weird roller rink.  And that is all I remember.