Still Life
This sounds like a memory.. of a visit to your grandparents' house in the countryside. It's a fairly large abode with acres of yard, grown just the right amount with trees and tall grass. Flora and fauna. You might've been able to spot squirrels or wild hummingbirds in the trees and bees relishing in the sunflowers, but that wasn't what you came for.
You came for summer to your grandparents' quiet little sanctuary. Your parents sent you there because they saw how you hid and suffered when they fought each other and both of them still cared enough to leave you out of it. Your grandparents were.. old but were still healthy and actively cared for at least a small part of their yard and oh how kind they were. Their voices, coarse with wisdom and reassurance, calmed you. Whatever they said, they said with absolute unbridled love tonally. Your grandparents and you had very different lives and views but they were open minded to you and they accepted you. They let you live in the house, on the yard, in the forest; anywhere you fucking pleased. All of you don't talk every day but knew you could if you wanted, just talking about the beauty of the leaves unkempt on the ground; how school was; nothing with much of any significance yet now it feels like the most significant conversation you ever had.
Back then, one night, under the stars, partially disturbed by stray branches of the great sycamore forest, you felt the strangest sensation of oneness. You did not realize it then but you realized it now: how important those few months were. At your worst, you received a second chance of unconditional acceptance and now you clutch onto it with all your strength. The memory of that summer has been there with you all your life: when you rejoined society, when you graduated college, when you got your first job at that studio and when you found that boy that was made in the same stars that you were made in.
Now you must hold onto them for a little while longer because that is how you keep them alive and how they watch over you and although now you have forgotten it, you'll remember it when you creak the door open. That still life leaning on the wall of your grandparents' house and the grand piano beside it. You took a photograph of it but you lost it somewhere. Now it lives with you.
