Shrink

When a star dies all of its life force retreats to the center, the heart. A white dwarf, they call it. Dull but lively, dying with all its might. I go walking on Halloween night and I'm troubled to find that my parents' neighborhood has gone the way of white dwarves. But it's not the neighborhood that's dying. It's something more nebulous, something that touches me even when I'm not here. When I was young there were children on every street. The darkness was so thin and brittle that you could part it like a veil. Laughter on the other side. Footsteps. Now there's only one street, long and truthfully darker than I remember, that anyone cares to visit. The fires at the edges of the driveways set the whole thing aglitter. This is how I know I'm looking with my heart and not my mind. I don't see faces, just movement and light, and I'm scared, for the first time, that I'm getting old. That I'm dying, and that's why I encounter these places that are fading into themselves, growing quieter and quieter by the year.

What if I'm just a house remembering itself? What if I'm just a heart?