I’ve Been Waiting for Someone to Walk Into This Room My Whole Life

The night the power went out, and I was ten years old again

Photo by author.

The storm didn’t scare me. The silence did.

Last night, the power went out.

That sounds more dramatic than it was. No transformer exploded. No tree came through the roof. The lights disappeared, the fans stopped, and suddenly the house was quiet in a way I hadn’t heard in decades.

I was already in a mood before any of it started. My father had opinions about women in sports that he’d shared about a thousand times and felt compelled to share again. My daughter was giving me shit about the car, the same car she drives to work five days a week, leaving me stuck here until she gets home, which I do without complaint because her anxiety about parking lots apparently outranks my need to leave the house. My ex called to use me as a punching bag about his job. The usual.

Nothing catastrophic. Just enough little cuts to leave me raw.

Then the storm rolled in.

I was lying in bed, door closed, three fans running, which is how I sleep, how I’ve always slept. Everybody always said don’t let the fan blow on your face, and I said fuck that. It makes me feel better, and I still say that. I have three fans in this room right now, and I don’t care.

The storm was coming through the window. I could see it even without my glasses. The branches bending. The leaves shifting direction and the sky darkening in layers. The door rattled in its frame because I had it closed, which is a thing I do now, close my door, because I’m 60 years old and I can.

Back then my door was open.

Always open.

My ears were open too. Always listening, waiting for the inevitable. A raised voice. Footsteps. Whatever was coming next. Someone who knows me well said it recently. “You’re always waiting for the next shoe to drop.” Yeah. That’s what 27 years in this house will do to you. It’s hard to break that spell.

I have a thing about loud noises. Not a quirk. A full-body response, the kind where you’re halfway across the room before you know you moved. I put plates into the cupboard carefully so they don’t clatter. I close doors slowly. I walk as silently as I can.

But I didn’t grow up in a quiet house. My father and my brother fought the way people fight when nobody’s stopping them — loud, physical, wall-shaking — and my mother’s response was to leave the room or screech at my brother, depending on her mood. Never at my father.

I wasn’t fighting at all. I was the one upstairs with a teddy bear in my lap, sitting at the top of the stairs and listening, trying to figure out if this was the time I needed to come downstairs. Sometimes I did. Once, when I was ten years old, I picked up the phone to call 911, and somebody grabbed it out of my hand. “You can’t call the police,” they said. “Everyone will get arrested.” I remember thinking, Yeah, and?

So that’s the house. That’s what the silence last night put me back inside.

I noticed the air change the way I always have. The leaves outside shifted. The branches bent. I could see the outlines moving beyond the window.

Not a window. The window. The one I’ve looked through for over 50 years. Same frame and same trees. That view of the sky going dark. The same place where I spent countless nights as a kid waiting for exactly that.

I loved storms.

Not because they were beautiful, but because they changed things. The temperature would drop. The air would move, and then the fan in the window would blow cool air through the room. Everything felt different afterward, for a little while anyway.

As a kid, I’d lie there watching the trees bend and think about being carried away with them. Not metaphorically. Literally. I wanted the wind to take me somewhere else. Anywhere else. Another town, another state, another life. I wanted to disappear into the storm and wake up somewhere I didn’t have to keep my ears open.

I don’t think I understood how badly until last night.

Because last night, I wasn’t remembering being a kid.

I was there.

Memory usually has distance. This didn’t. The room went black. The years dissolved. The 60-year-old went with it all. I wasn’t a landlord or a mother or the person everyone calls when things fall apart. I was a scared little girl, with my door open and one ear pointed down the hall, waiting.

I could feel how scared she was, and how tired. How badly she wanted someone to walk in and say, “I’ve got it from here.”

I wanted rescue. I think I still do.

There. I said it.

Not rescue in a fairytale sense. Not somebody on horseback or even a particular person. Just the feeling that someone bigger, steadier, and safer would walk into the room and take something off the pile for five goddamn minutes.

That’s an embarrassing thing for a 60-year-old woman to admit. I’ve spent most of my life being the person who says, “I’ve got it from here,” to everyone else. I’m the listener. A fixer. The one people call.

I don’t know if living back here is exposure therapy or just fucked up. Both I suppose.

I grew up in this house and left it as fast as I could. People expected me to be happy about the wedding, the romance, and the beginning of adult life. That’s the story.

But when I think about leaving, I don’t remember the wedding.

I remember the driveway. The U-Haul. Pulling away.

My mother was crying, but I wasn’t. I was practically euphoric. I didn’t love her at the time, if I’m being honest. Probably closer to hating her.

She’d had chances to stop things in that house and she hadn’t taken them. That wasn’t the only reason, but it was enough. I wasn’t driving toward anything. I was just driving away.

For decades, I lived elsewhere.

Then life happened, the way it does. My father got sick and my marriage fell apart. I thought it was temporary.

I didn’t come back. I just ran out of other options. And here I am, in the same room, with the same window, and the same thing I’ve been trying to outrun since I was a kid.

I sat there last night thinking about my college roommate, who became a nomad and never stopped moving. I thought about my childhood friend nearby, who lives eight minutes from the house she grew up in and won’t go near it. I drove past it once without her and mentioned it later. She said, “Nope. Not going.”

Do they know something I don’t? Maybe some places know too much about you, and the only sane response is to keep moving.

Or maybe they’re just afraid of finding out what I found out last night.

That the kid they thought they left behind is still there, still at the window. Still waiting.

My kids never lived through what happened in this house. They grew up somewhere else entirely, in a different house, a different state, and my ex and I were not perfect parents, but we never did that. Nobody’s going to lie in a dark bedroom listening for footsteps because of anything that happened on my watch. I need to say that because I don’t say it often enough.

I sit here staring at this fucking window thinking, You have no idea. My kids don’t. My ex certainly doesn’t. The people who tell me to get over it, and the ones who say, “God forbid you think your parents were shitty people.” They don’t get it. Meanwhile, I’m ten years old again with my door open and my ear pointed at the hallway.

Thirty years of therapy, and apparently I never got here. And then last night a storm rolled through a window I’ve known my whole life, and I was six and eight and ten all at once, and I don’t even know how to understand that at 60. Christ.

The power eventually came back on.

The fans started spinning, and the room cooled. Everything returned to whatever passes for normal.

I can’t let her go, I guess. But last night, for the first time, I don’t think she was asking me to.

I think she just wanted me to finally hear her.

And I think I did.