Someone Else's Life

I stand waiting, watching the glowing numbers count down.

Anticipating the sharp, dinging sound of the old microwave preparing to alert me that frozen meatballs and mashed potatoes are now ready for consumption.

Ah, there it is!

Opening the door I reach for a black container arranged precisely under the white light, pulling it towards me.

Removing the plastic film, hot steam escapes into the quiet air, rising like a dance, filling this kitchen with a semblance of home cooking from days long g

Rising above, like a dance, my eyes follow upward to the coppered tin ceiling. I imagine it once sheltering a family's hard and soft years as they created a story all their own under the now tarnished canopy, embedded with laughter and tears.

My gaze drops to the countertops cluttered with dishes and papers and pieces of a personal existence that do not beling to me. Scouring the scene for a place to set down this meal.

Searching to no avail, I hold it instead while facing the myriad of polaroid photographs in color, in black and white, tacked randomly upon wallpaper printed with roosters.

There's

There's black and white.

I am drawn to the young man standing next to a Joshua Tree in what appears to be the painted desert - maybe 1970 something?

Tee-shirt, shorts, and a smile pulling at his eyes like a puppet on a string, leaving this viewer wondering at the hint of lostness in youth, just below the surface of two brown irises trying to hide the clouds.

I stand closer, squinting.

I believe it is him.

Those eyes.

Here, he's standing by a bicycle, strapping on a helmet, perhaps to ride a ribbon of highway. Yellow leaves have landed at his feet from a tree I cannot see, and the massive mountains in the distance announce he is far northwest; that would be over two thousand miles away from his southern Tennessee roots.

The mystery of fall is upon him. He is young and ready for the race, even if it is against himself.

This one is torn on the corner. A woman with long braids draping down the sides of her almost regal cheekbones, a small child sleeping upon her lap of billowing skirts.

A boy perhaps? So hard to tell.

Her eyes appear gentle within the graying tones of ink, arms wrapped protectively around the bundle she holds; both faces seeming to fade away as the years take back this moment.

I am drawn to this one and lift it from the scrapbooked wall, scattered above the kitchen sink.

It leaves behind a small, yellowed square, showing just how long it lived in that space amongst houses, flowers, pets, and groups of people cut out of the picture by inexperienced photographers.

Blurred hands, heads, and bodies of souls I will never know.

A time I never knew.

Someone else’s life.

On the other side of the wall an old man sits in front of a metal television tray, and I gather myself to walk through the doorway he once walked independently, when the journey was kinder, and the world still spun.

When he was strong, agile and his sturdy frame rode bicycles with the sun in his face, the wind at his back. Now small and frail, tucked between two floral pillows on a worn-out couch, it has surrendered to the clock.

I place the lunch before him. He does not flinch.

Just a black and white portrait, tinted with two brown irises staring out the window; sifting through colors of painted deserts and Joshua Trees that live forever.