Waiting for Fayme outside her parents’ LeDroit Park house I notice how it hasn’t gotten smaller with time, unlike most things from the past. I’ve been here countless times but not in years. Breathing consciously. I keep my attention on Fayme’s house.
Don’t look around.
Cooper Circle isn’t far, but I tell myself that it’s out of the way of my Shaw neighborhood apartment on Euclid and my parents’ place on 10th. The houses along the traffic circle are nearly identical if I remember.
Don’t look around.
There’s only one house here I’ve ever been inside.
Don’t look around.
But I don’t listen. I turn to the sound of a whisper coming from the house where I preserve my adolescence — Gwena’s childhood home. The house was lovely: Every thing fit into a tasteful color scheme with just the right amount of contrast and accents and a spacing aesthetic that played never felt empty or cluttered. The house was immaculate: No thing was ever out of place. Cold and untouchable, it was more a museum than a home — a place to appreciate, not live.
Twelve years have passed since I last saw Gwena’s face, lovely and sad, looking out from the embroidered curtain just below the conical rooftop. I still see her face through the white and blue trim window on the third floor.
I’d watch her through her often-open window curtain on spring and summer nights. No matter how often I did so it was never enough. Watching her through that window was like watching “Star Wars” or reading “The Lord of the Rings” again. That experience brings the same joy as the first time and I begin to say the lines by memory and notice subtleties that I hadn’t before. Some nights I was sneaked inside. Fewer I was invited in. But most I spent out here. My back against the night. The harsh smell of manicured bushes and grass combating the sweet fragrance of yellow and purple flowers, as I lay in the bushes planted in the roundabout of which her house made part of the circumference of Cooper Circle.
Gwena’s routine rarely changed. Play the cassette-tape stereo on top of her pinewood dresser. Something soft, often melancholy. Sometimes picking songs and artists I had introduced to her a day or two before. The circle may have protected her from what lay outside, but evidence of the outside found its own way in and the music drowned out the sounds of the city below. The voices. The dogs. The cars. The gunshots. The sirens. The troubles within her head and within her house. Burn a stick of incense bought from a street vendor selling his wares just a few blocks away on Georgia Avenue just outside the gates of Howard University where her parents worked. Turn off the lights. Open the window and turn on the fan to cool the air during D.C.’s stifling nights that seemed to last from spring till fall. Her room was shielded from the streetlights, only the moonlight shone through. Look out her window onto the moon. With the lights off she remained hidden even looking through the window. Only a dark, featureless frame. A silhouette. Looking out, pining of what was, what could be.
But she’s gone.
Again I watch Fayme’s house. But there’s the same whisper — the word “say” — coming from the other house. I turn and notice the blinds are now open, a light on inside Gwena’s old room. There is no more noise. But a masterless shadow glides through the room to the window. There the dark form lingers. The shadow leans out the window with its head jutting toward me as though it’s staring, watching me.
Fayme walks outside and then whips out her overnight bag from her oversized purse and smiles.