The Hallway Window Seat

Lyrics

I'm climbing again. Always climbing.

Up from the Servant's Stair Landing, where the air is always cool.
The door to the Master Bedroom is closed, a deep breath held on the other side. I turn away from it today.
Instead, I walk the Portrait Hall.
Their eyes, shellac and oil, follow me down the runner. They don't approve, or they don't care. The difference is just time.

And here. The pause in the sentence of the hallway.
The window seat.
The dust motes dance in the slanted bar of late afternoon light. The faded cushion is a map of old blues. I trace a water stain from 1952, or maybe last week.

You were not a room, just a space for waiting.
Waiting for a carriage, waiting for a fever to break in the Sick Room down the hall. Waiting for a single word.
The glass is cool. It shows me the lawn, and the ghost of the Portrait Hall behind me, all at once.
The dead watching the living watch the green.

I run a finger along the small brass latch. It smells like an old coin.
Inside, I know there's a penny from 1923 and a clover that gave up its luck to wax paper.
A small girl hid here from her lessons, making the world under the seat her whole country.
She is still here. Her breath fogs a corner of the pane that never quite clears.

The warmth of the sun on my arm doesn't feel like heat. It has a color.
It's the precise, thick amber of honey forgotten in the back of the Pantry.
I remember reading a letter in this light, the paper so thin I could see the words from the other side.
Or I remember a portrait of a woman reading a letter. The memory fits either way.

The sun slips behind the oak. The bar of light is gone.
The window is just a dark mirror now, showing a hallway.
And a small room inside the hallway, holding a shadow.