the cellar of regret

I put out the cigaret in the ashtray next to the coffee cup, and look out of the window. My eyes pass over the familiar trees in the garden. It's fall and with nature preparing to die, the leaves have all turned yellow, some of them already lying on the ground. Four apple trees, two cherry and an old pear tree that has a child's swing hanging from it. The rope is old and weathered, the wooden seat has started to go soft and slowly fall apart from the fungus that has taken over. Far away I can see the hills rising just before the earth plummets into the sea.

It is one of these grey days that press on my chest and make it more difficult to breathe. It feels as if the grey clouds moving slowly against the impenetrable curtain of the grey sky, will surround me and suffocate me. I look at the heavy metal clock on the kitchen wall, just past 10am. Time seems endless here, and within these walls ambition feels vain.

I have been watching the days roll by over the hills through this window for the past four years now. I have learned that life moves, and everything moves with it. If you don't move along with life it can brutally leave you just standing there. So I stay in the same spot. I wake up in the morning, I get out of bed, wash, dress, go to work, interact with people, I come back home. Like any normal man. But I am not like you. You laugh, cry, feel joy, sadness. You raise your glass to toast, tell a joke, share your ideas. But I just watch you and I try to copy what you do. I laugh when you laugh, read the paper like you do, follow a conversation you started. I try to blend in, hiding behind mediocracy so that you will not find out that inside me there is nothing. My body should have just caved in years ago because there is nothing inside, no soul, no desire, nothing to hold me up. I am hollow. I don't build up my life inside my head like you do, dream up a future, fill it with beautiful moments. I don't wonder about the weather or plan holidays, for inside my vast emptiness there is no room for that, there is only regret.

Under the table in the kitchen, where I sit, there is a small door in the floor. I drag my foot across it. I like to feel its outline under my feet. The door is just heavy enough so that a small child could not lift it open. It leads to the cellar underneath the house. A ladder takes you down to a small, cold, damp room lined with empty shelves. If it rains and the river next to the house wells up, the cellar floods and the water will come up to my knees.

This door was never supposed to be left open unsupervised. Lili was never supposed to wander into the kitchen on her own. But on one rainy day the cellar flooded again and I went to the shed to fetch a bucket, leaving Lili in the living room by herself. Just for that moment life rushed past so fast, leaving me sitting here now at the kitchen table, adamant to stay behind from the rest of the current. My feet are pressing firmly on this door, waiting for roots to grow and blend in with the wood so that life would just spring up around me, envelop me and leave me here buried inside my own emptiness.