Describe the place you grew up.

Describe the place you grew up.

I was born in Boscherville, France, outside of Rouen. The house was a romantic little cottage, cozy but not too small - intended for a growing family. There were vines overpowering the stone walls, goaded on by garden and orchard. The door was painted a welcoming red colour...but I expect I saw the outside of my house less than twenty times in my life, something that most children take for granted.

The interior of my house was something I knew much more about. The kitchen was homey, with a tiled flooring and mahogany cupboards. The stove was ancient, barely functional, though as I recall, my mother used it quite well. Not that it did much good; I have never been fond of food, I'm afraid. The dining-room was small and lined with hutches that once had been paned with glass, before my mother had had it removed. My mother kept many things in them; sheaves of paper for writing, my father's old journals, her mother's jewelery, and little trinkets that she'd gotten from who knew where. Porcelain ballerinas that would spin gently and play an amusing little tune when properly wound. China dolls with pink cheeks, white faces and tiny, tiny red mouths. I wondered how they could manage to speak with such small lips.

The living-room was equally homey, with a huge Victorian fireplace dominating the eastern wall, covered with portraits of both my parents; the handsome father that I'd never met, and my mother, when she was still young and without worries...She had always been the very picture of unmitigated beauty, I thought. The sofa was maroon and unholstered in velvet, and sprinkled with small, decorative throw pillows. There were a number of other chairs in the room, high-backed but still plush, in varying earthy tones. There was a beautiful Persian rug on the floor, and when Father Mansart would come to speak mass to myself and mother of Sundays, I would let its intricacies dance with my bored eyes as my mind absorbed scriptures and psalms and varied reprimands. When I was younger, I wished that I might one day visit Persia, visit the country where such beauty was created. Thinking back on it, I must allow myself a vague chuckle at my youthful folly.

There was also a bathroom; wholly unremarkable, except for the conspicuous painting hung on one wall. The French countryside would have been an excellent touch for a large room, but in this compact space, it seemed ridiculous. Once, I ventured to peer beneath it, unsure of what I would find. I was disappointed; it merely covered up an ugly rectangular spot on the wall, where the plaster had come away. I learned, later, that there had been a mirror fixated firmly to the wall there.

My mother's room was a place I only saw the interior of once or twice. It was the only room in our house with a mirror, though I did not know it. It was a place of mystery for me; all in light, airy colours, but with stifling velveteen curtains of deepest crimson, blocking light fantastically. I don't remember much of the room itself...but I would eventually come to know the furniture quite intimately, in a different setting.

I was not allowed downstairs without my mask. Yet, since the mask had been sewn for me when I was but an infant, it was ill-fitting and inexpressably uncomfortable. So where I primarily grew up was a small attic-room, which can be described thusly:

Absolutely everything was wooden. From the rafters that hung too low for my growing frame to the floorboards which gapped immensely, allowing small, titchy things of mine to be lost forever in limbo between floor and ceiling. My bed, until I was too tall to squeeze into it, was an expensive bassinet that my mother had purchased for the son she intended to have. Even after I had graduated to a more comfortable form of bedding, it remained in my room, now serving as a cradle for my books and works, which I loved and attended to far more than my mother loved or attended to me.

Above my disembodied trundle-bed, in the ceiling, was a water-stain, and for many, many weeks, when breaking from my incessant creativity, I would stare at it, letting my mind focus on nothing else. I suppose I was meditating, though I did not know what that was, and if I had, I may have ceased it - meditation was considered to be a work of Satan. It was an amorphous stain, for the most part, and I saw many things in it; a common tea-kettle, the toy rocking-horse that I had never played with, two small children playing. As I grew older, I began to see more intricate details; the feathered wings of an angel, the crossing lines that added sharpness to a note, my mother's curvaceous figure from behind as she prepared to bathe. I saw that one more and more often.

The wood-stain was a favourite toy of mind. When I had tired of my more professional hobbies, when I had set aside my technical drafts and my unfinished compositions, and felt like being a child, I turned to it for amusement. I found that I could stare at it for hours. When one is confined to a tiny attic bedroom for nearly all of one's time...one finds ways to amuse themselves. Since I was a good, practising Catholic, I did not understand, condone, or engage in self-pleasure, so while one might reasonably assume that a young boy with too much time in his idle hands would masturbate constantly, I shall state right now that I never once did so. Instead, I stared at a stain on my ceiling. To be honest, I wonder whether to be proud of my abstinence, or curse my faithfulness to a God who had abandoned me. Certainly, masturbating would have done wonders for my disposition.

However, there was a fateful night, as there always is, in this sort of story. I was laying, watching my mother's backside in a blurry relief of tan and dark brown, flickering in the candle-light (I had only one window, and it was firmly boarded), when suddenly she simply...disappeared. My eyes had unfocused just a bit too far, taken in a new aspect of the picture that my brain had never before welcomed. The stain had not changed, and I suppose if I had focused on regaining the picture I had been memorising, instead of being intrigued by this new turn of events, I might have been spared.

I am damnably curious, sometimes.

What had once been my mother's arm, the head of the rocking-horse, was now one eye. The horse's ear, my mother's lovely hair blowing in the wind, was the other. What had once been a round, if slightly lumpy tea-kettle, which, amusingly enough, accounted for the silhouette's rear end, was a gaping hole. The bath, the handle of the kettle, and the skiis of the rocking-horse now were a mangled rictus of a smile. The face glared down at me in its wobbly horror, and in the dark of my room, I felt a shiver go down my back - I was still young enough to be frightened of such things. In my fright, I grabbed my candlestick out of its holder and took it to the ceiling, scorching the rough wood until all that remained of my only friends - the kettle, the horse, and my imaginary mother - was a black, charred splotch.

I have often thought of my life as a much larger version of this particular episode.