The Back Bedroom

Lyrics

The air is thinner back here. Colder. Up the servant's flight, where the varnish ends and the wood is just wood. 

Past the top of the Servant's Stair Landing. The long throat of the Portrait Hall to the left, a dozen gazes catching dust in the half-light. I don't look. I turn right, away from the Sick Room, won't carry that particular silence with me today. The corridor narrows. The floorboards complain with a higher pitch. This was always the appendix of the house, the part that could be removed without consequence. The last door. Brass knob, loose in its plate.

And here. The Back Bedroom. Where the light comes in without opinion. It's not the golden light of the Morning Room or the dramatic slant of the attic. It’s just grey, honest light. It shows you the water stain on the ceiling shaped like a lung. It shows you the ghost of a narrow bed pressed into the wallpaper for seventy years. It doesn't forgive the scuffs on the baseboard. It just holds them. 

This was never a room for family. It was a room for necessity. A place for the governess's visiting sister, the one with the sad eyes. A place for the boxes that didn't fit in the Trunk Room. A place for waiting. I remember the smell of ironed linen and something else, something like damp wool, from the winter of 1941. They say a distant cousin died in here. I don't remember a cousin. I remember the draft from the window frame, sharp as a pin. 

On the wall, the plaster has a hairline crack that is the precise shape of the river on the map downstairs. And on the small, plain table, a child's forgotten block of wood. Carved into its surface is this room. A tiny window, a tiny bed, a tiny door. A room holding a room. When the house groans against the wind, the sound feels exactly like the rough, splintery grain of the pine floorboards under your bare feet. A sound you can touch.

This is the Back Bedroom. Where the light comes in without opinion. Not gold, not dramatic. Just grey, honest light. It shows you the water stain shaped like a lung. It shows you the two faint rectangles where pictures hung, their subjects forgotten but their weight remembered. It doesn't forgive. It just holds.

It doesn't keep secrets. It just keeps quiet. The walls don't talk. They just have indentations. You close the door and the latch makes a simple, wooden click. A sound like a full stop.