Pèle-mèle

I’m home.
Isn’t that’s what we call our parents’ house?

Maybe regression is inevitable when going home. Although, it isn’t home anymore, of course. I don’t like the idea of regression, so I hold myself in check, so as to not slip back into obnoxious teenage mode. I am silent and unquestionable, but as considerate as I can manage.
Yes, it is good to be here.
I have spent most of the past six days in horizontal position under a tree, reading my way through a pile of novels; few of them have managed to fully capture my attention; maybe they just do’t talk about me and my own self centered vicissitudes enough... Maybe I should stick to classics.

I have reintegrated my old room, still dark, still full of my Goth velleities. The old plastic spiders are pinned onto the wall; the cupboard is still full of black rags. There are also stacks of old letters, held together by purple ribbon; I was such a romantic.
My mother never acknowledged the right to privacy, and only gives a perfunctory knock on my door before barging in. She is glad to have company, albeit the silent kind.
She has given away my brother’s clothes but kept his books and his collections. My brother was a serious collector: notes, coins, stamps, postcards, exotic paquets of cigarettes, lead soldiers, rocks, sand from deserts from all over the globe, poured into little glass vials. His bedroom was, and still is, a display case.
In every room but mine, there are pictures of him, taken on one of their journeys together in Syria, Jordan, Morocco, Laos, Turkey, Afghanistan. One of them shows him, minute, walking up a gigantic dune. How appropriate. He against the world?
I went into town and looked proprietally at things and places; so many changes! no one consulted me before digging up huge holes in the town center.
I went to visit my grandmother, who will tell anyone who will listen that I am her favourite grandchild. With me she is brisk, dismissive of gestures of affection; I tried to hug her once, a few years ago. That wasn’t too successful.
She gave me money. I won’t cash the cheque, because her monthly pension is probably less than what I make per week.
My grandmother is 85; she won’t let anyone else wind up her old clock, which involves climbing onto a chair and standing on the kitchen table. Her house is full of hazards, which she dismisses cheerfully; she barely allows her sons to chop her wood for her.
She showed me pictures of my cousin’s wedding; her husband looks like an idiot; my grandmother and I agree.

I have decided to go to San Francisco after all and see if my relationship can be patched up.

Normal service and proper paragraphing will resume on my retun to London.