The Vision of Expiry

My darling Emily stands where she once anxiously awaited the school bus, but now her face is remarkably sadder. Her shoulders engulf her neck, and her mouth wriggles wildly out of its rigid stoicism. She is suppressing her feelings, but I knew Emily’s emotion always nestled in her brilliant eyes: bloodshot, glazed over, and yet resolved to suppress the pain. To my displeasure and shame, she feared entering her childhood home! I heard her thinking, oh God, why?
Emily knows that she will revisit her past within, because I never felt the need to rearrange our private world. She will find our giant-pancake-breakfast pans and the pencil marks, slightly faded, on her bedroom wall, which I kept to hold onto every stage of my beautiful Emily. The fragile guitar sleeps still in its stand, dormant since she brought it home like a stray cat in eighth grade and nurtured it for three or four months. My perfume bottles tinge the air in a cool indigo of fir. That which remains of her life is still here for her, and she hopes her quest concludes in any of these simple details of her childhood.
I hope for her sake and, admittedly, selfishly too that her childhood demons had departed our home. If not, I hadn’t saved her from the difficulty of this. If the demons persist, her new grievances will call upon their deplorable brethren to hurt my struggling Emily. I remember a prepubescent Emily smiling in quiet disappointment because I could not offer her everything she wanted on my own. I see that Emily who waited at the edge of the road for the school bus trod home in tears because another girl had betrayed her trust one day. Today’s Emily possessed a harder face, for I had encouraged her not to let other people into her heart without her permission. She never did learn to hide her eyes. She clarified herself through them. Why did things have to change?
Her thoughts echo in her vast, empty genius. Nothing else traipses because the rush hour of grief had already jostled every thought and feeling out of the grand meeting area. Not even the tick of time resounds within, perhaps because acknowledging time would overwhelm my shining Emily. Better to not think anything as she stands before a task too great for someone her age to bear alone.
I try to tell her that it would be okay for her to bite dazedly into her fingernails as she had when she confronted a childhood problem, but she stoops, almost shrinking while counting her breaths as she took the first step towards her past, thinking, the older I get, the more I lose control. She finds her nerve and jams it into her strides towards the little yellow door that once matched the white window boxes’ tulips. The window boxes dream of those days when they perched beneath the panes of glass, but they upended themselves long ago, to bemoan their fallowness.
I am granted my vision of expiry for this moment, among few others. She seeks something from the past, to which I may guide her. The token cannot be found, yet she feels it in her memories. She thinks plunging headfirst into reminiscence will give her what she wants, but she also nags herself that it may not be there. I am the wind chimes, and I am the glimmering reflection of light on the dining room table to illuminate a world she fears to, but must, embrace.
“My daughter Emily. If I had control, I would give it to you, but we never have that responsibility,” I call out of the silence of our home.