After several nights without remembering a dream, you find yourself back at your parents’ house.
The carport is almost as it was, although the light seems to have travelled a long way to reach it, carrying the faint atmosphere of somewhere abandoned but not quite empty. Your father is there, and for a moment his presence has the strange familiarity of something that should not require explanation.
You tell him he has returned.
The words seem inadequate, but there is nothing else to say.
The shed is behind you, still filled with his things. You have been clearing it out. You tell him what has gone and ask him not to be shocked.
He hasn’t opened the door yet.
You wait for his face.
Then you wake.
For a moment the room is still dark, and somewhere behind the waking world there is the carport, the unopened shed, your father’s things waiting in the particular silence of things that have outlived their owner.
The door has not opened.
Notitia — attending to what remains, and to what cannot yet be known.
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