The Main Attic

Lyrics

Up from the heart. Past the Portrait Hall where the faces blur into one long stare. I don't look. I know their names and the names of their ghosts. Past the Eldest Daughter's Room, its door shut on a silence from 1952. The air thins as I climb. The Servant's Stair Landing offers a choice. I take the final, narrow flight. The heat gathers under the roof. The Attic Landing is a pause, a breath before the archive.
The air doesn't move in here. It waits. A single beam of light from a round window, thick with dust. And every mote is a star that has burned out. Every particle, a collapsed story. This is not a room of things. It is a room of gravity. The place where what is over comes to rest.
There is a logic to the stacks, but it is not human. A steamer trunk from a voyage in 1922 sits on a box of unspooled cassette tapes. A broken rocking horse guards a tower of ledgers whose ink has faded to brown lace. I remember them arriving. I remember the hands that put them here, thinking 'for now,' thinking 'later.' Later is a long, slow season in this room. The house discards nothing. It simply elevates it, brings it closer to the sun and the rain, to be unmade by the quiet work of the roof.
That sound. It has the exact texture of a newspaper from 1945, the one that announced a peace. Brittle, yellowed, ready to dissolve if you touch it. In the corner, a dollhouse, a perfect model of this one. Its tiny attic door is ajar. And inside, I know, is another house, just as perfect, just as forgotten. The memory of the memory, sleeping in the dust.
Nothing is lost. It is only indexed. It is only still. The heat of a hundred summers is stored in the wood. The weight of a hundred winters presses on the rafters. I am the witness. The catalogue writes itself. And waits.