“…even children get older…

…and i’m getting older, too.”
+stevie n i c k s

when i was little, we had a glass-topped table. it belonged to my mother and father, so naturally, it was the bane of my step-mother’s existence when she moved in. it was beveled on the edges where it connected to a cheap plywood frame on its perimeter. the angle of the bevel caused the light from the glass doors in the kitchen to be refracted onto the linoleum floor.
the ugly floor, with a chain of flowers bordering each small tile, i always hated it. it was too girly, like the name i was given, which i chose to change for that very reason when i was seven.
i remember sitting on that floor, poking the rainbows that were produced by the table on many a saturday morning. they always fascinated me and i could never figure out why i could only pick out maybe three or four distinctive colours in them. we learned in school there were something like seven colours in a rainbow.
the doors that the light streamed through opened up to thin air. it was jammed with a dusty rod shoved into the bottom, so i couldn’t wander over there at a given point, open it and then tumble to my death. the intention was a for deck, but that wasn’t accomplished until perhaps a year or two before we moved out. and i think it was built with that end in mind.

wood decks add a little to property value.

the space was nice. the atmosphere really opened up and became notable near the end, though, when all the remnants of my mother were finally eradicated and the whole place was stripped clean for the market. i think the ghosts of my mother just haunted the place too thickly until then. you could feel the air coating your skin, sometimes, and i often felt like i couldn’t breathe.
…and perhaps it was truly more subjective than that. my own hormones began leveling off some and i started to realize my family consisted of actual humans and not parasites that existed solely to drain my lifeforces.
it’s funny how memories congeal into balls of general emotional responses. i can find myself looking around in my mind like i’m in some kind of VR game trying to resurrect a physical feel for the maps i made long, long ago.

i totally forgot about those rainbows until today.

…and i still don’t really know what made me think of them.

refraction.