Hospital
Marenna will be home soon. I think of the time I met her several years ago.
I was briefly staying in a hospital for a bout of depression. I had not
seen her for years; my wife, Mary, had disliked her immensely. Now she had
left me. Immediately, I tried to contact Marenna; after meeting my wife
I had gradually dissolved my friendships, hers included. But old friendships
resist, I thought, and perhaps she will understand that I had always been
near to her in my sleep. Marenna was not home: she was on a month long trip
in Italy, vindicated. Down the corridor, I heard a footfall: this was two
weeks later; somehow, the news had reached her. In fact, I discovered later
that it had been my wife who had sent her. Marenna now had hennaed hair,
a brassy red. I remember asking her to stand out of the light because it
irked me.
She's not home now so her house feels like the hospital again : all corridors
leaning crazily, disrupting rooms.