The Wife's Sitting Room

Lyrics

I'm coming up from the first floor. Past the weight of the clock in the hall.
The stairs complain, each one a different note of warning.
Up into the heart of the house, where the real ghosts are.
I pass The Portrait Hall, all those captured faces, their stories sealed in oil and varnish.
All those loud, certain lives.
They watch me go, on my way to a room that has no portrait.
Here, on the second floor landing, the air is thin.
I keep my eyes from the crack of light under The Master Bedroom door.
And I turn my head from the silence that isn't silence coming from The Nursery.
Not today. Not that story.
I'm here for the gap in the record.
The room tucked behind the others, the one whose name is a question.
And the door is here. Your door. The Wife's Sitting Room.
There's no biography here, no history. Only a hypothesis in plaster and wood.
This isn't a memory, it's a catastrophe of absence.
A life started with three blue stitches and no more.
Just three blue stitches and then... the silence.
I open the door. The smell is faint, dried lavender and the ghost of cold tea.
The light through the sheer curtains is pale, apologetic.
Did you sit in this chair? Did you watch the day fail from this window?
I am asking the air, I am asking the dust.
On the floor, by the leg of the chair, the needlework.
Just a square of linen, a needle still pinned.
Three knots of blue thread. One, two, three. A beginning that never became.
There is no sound, but the dust motes climbing the light have a sound.
A thin silver wire of a note, high and constant.
It's the only thing that proves the air is moving in here.
I touch the teacup on the table. So cold. White porcelain.
In its curve, I see the room again, smaller, emptier.
A copy of a void is still a void.
I remember you drinking the tea, or I remember the gesture of a hand that was never here.
The difference is gone.
There's no biography here, no history. Only a hypothesis in plaster and wood.
This isn't a memory, it's a catastrophe of absence.
A life started with three blue stitches and no more.
Just three blue stitches and then... the silence.
I try to give you a name. It won't stick to the air. It has no texture, no weight.
I try to imagine your face, but it's just the reflection of my own in the windowpane.
Looking into a room that's looking back into me.
The house remembers everything, but it does not remember you.
Or it remembers your absence so perfectly, so completely...
That the absence is what it preserves.
Three stitches.
The start of a pattern.
The thread is still waiting.
The needle is still waiting.