du Maurier

The door opens, but I am not the new Mrs. de Winter, just an awkward shadow slipping into normalcy, where words are thicker than hardcovers— silence clinging like dust to the spines of books with torn out pages. I wander, but do not answer. The air is full of Maxim’s secrets, dreadful weights of things unsaid— longings for something that has slipped through time. A voice stirs, a name floating, half-heard through the Manderley of my mind of forgotten conversations— mine, or someone else’s? I can’t say. Then, he moves— pulling du Maurier from the shelf, as if it was never meant to be out of reach. I watch, but cannot touch. In the end, I fumble on words saying foolish things like “itty-bitty” trying not to say too much—but every time I speak self-idiocy mocks the darkened expanses of my wild, Cornwall brain. “You’re not stupid,” he says, as if the thought had been his all along, and I am startled, not by the words, but by the shipwreck of them— the knowing. 2.22.25