skit #31: another's or perhaps many others'

Another lives in your relinquished home. Some gyrating, caterwauling, avant garde troupe acts in the theatre you so gently graced. Some ambitious junta seizes the dying king's palace, disposing of the vassalage, raping all the maidens. Your stage, your castle! Landmarks fit only for preservation, not residence.

Innocent espionage reveals new blinds, new wallpaper, new toilet seat cozies, new potpourri recommended by a vastly overpaid interior decorator. The new tenants bear vile habits: tobacco stains the ceiling you were conceived in; auspices lay in the cast turkey bones littered about the kitchen floor; the bathroom smells like another's, or perhaps many others', excretions.

Afterwards, you understand your curious and uninvited company. The interlopers rifling through your rubbish, rapeling in through your sky light, squeaking the floorboards with melancholy reminiscense. You understand their look of betrayal, their look of entitlement. You, after all, live in another's relinquished home. Sometimes, you'll awkwardly greet one another, remark on the weather.

Among your stains, your bones, your smells, you realize you don't know your habits, only how others differ. All the ways in which you have never lived in your home, others have and will. You relinquish the house (which you have suddenly determined to be intolerably small) like a hermit crab does a shell.

The larger-than-the-smaller house evokes the same motions of memories, the migration patterns of caribou, the spawning pools full of fertilized roe and expired salmon, the unrest of ephemera. You sense another has lived here before you, and certain someone will afterwards, but that never one will during.