Things

He was up in his old bedroom though it no longer felt like his.

Those books, all those titles, holding all those answers, looked tired, hopeless, over…deserted.

For years he’d loved them, turned their pages so eagerly, thought so very hard.

Out of that window he used to gaze for hours, waiting for a chance, an opening for the answer to enter.

And now, it was as if he was looking at a past life, or even a life before that…entirely deceased…and as he walked over to the window that looked over the tennis courts, in the corner of his eye he noticed up where the frame joined the ceiling, a small yellowish sign of Spring…a spider’s egg sac, all alone, just bigger than his finger tip.

And he sighed.

“All those answers,” he thought, “all those things I never understood, all those obscure intuitions that never revealed themselves…yes, all of that magic I tried to make my own. But I had no right.”

And the books on the shelves seemed to shrink away and die, or perhaps it was just that they returned to being books, simple books, as he returned the secret he had never understood back to his old friends, the spider’s sac, the blue of the sky, the slate of the roofs, back to these things where all the answers lived, and could once again, curl up and sleep.