He moves by necessity from one room to the next. The passage way closes behind him; there will be no going back. Past is past. Gone. Irretrievable. And he will stay in this room only briefly, before moving to the next, and the next after that. Each one larger. And so it goes. Then one day he shall exit through the final passage, leaving this house forever, never to return. It will have become to small to meet his growing needs. All that remains are the former chapters of his life. He wonders where the next ones shall be written.
Awakening early in her attic apartment, he stood at the window looking out over the rooftops of the German city. He imagined the flash and detonation of British bombs dropped here thirty years earlier. That night she had told him her father had been a Luftwaffe pilot who bombed London during the Blitz. Staring across the rebuilt city he recalled his grandparents telling him about a night spent in the Covent Garden tube station, coming up the next morning to find their flat a pile of rubble. Fires still raging. Their neighbors dead. He did not tell her that story.
Staring into the mirror, trying on his dead friend's shirts, he would keep what fit, the rest destined for another’s closet. He wanted them all. They had similar builds, but the cut was often too tight in the shoulders, or they were not long enough. He was sad leaving some behind. Memories abandoned. Each shirt recalls an occasion when his friend wore it. He smiles and looks at the pile of shirts. Whether they fit is irrelevant. He decides to take them all to keep his friend near, whispering to him from the closet about those distant memories they shared.
