Every night when I go to bed, I pass a small window on the hall landing halfway up the stairs. In fact, I pass it whenever I go up (or down) stairs, not just when I go to bed, but that's neither here nor there. I've done so for 50 out of the last 54 years, the four-year difference being on account of my family moving to another house after 11 years and returning here four years later. Regular Crivvies know the details already, so I'm just setting the scene for new visitors to Crivens.
When living in that other house, my way home from my Town's main Shopping Centre enabled me to see the landing window of my former domicile through a gap between a row of houses and a block of flats a little distance away. (Obviously, I could also see it when going in the opposite direction.) Sometimes, at night, the hall light would be on and the window illuminated, and I'd imagine I still lived there and was looking through a time warp to when I yet inhabited the house.
Now that I'm back here, it seems strange to think there was a period I could gaze on the exterior of the window from afar, and its interior is now once again part of my everyday life. Sometimes, I just can't help imagining, as I pause on the hall landing on my way up or down the stairs, that an ethereal younger version of myself is heading home to that other house and glancing over at the window behind which I stand, on his way back to a home he no longer lives in.
Cue Twilight Zone theme?
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