Chasing Lilacs

Aftermath is sharing an excerpt from 'Chasing Lilacs,' a personal essay by Brenda Romero that appears in the book CTRL: Essays on Video Games. Rather than a straight narrative, Romero reconstructs her childhood through the spaces of her family home on Montgomery Street—the front porch where her brother practiced guitar, the dining room mahogany table passed down through generations, the stairs where she once spelled out her boyfriend's name step by step. Each room unfolds at different ages: at four, she watches her brother play. At fifteen, she skips the porch to avoid his Segovia records. By twenty, she hears his music from Hawaii even in his absence. It's a poetic architecture of memory, where the house itself becomes a character—the place where her father bent a lead pipe to test a suitor, where her mother listened for break-ins from the couch, and where lilacs bloomed on the dining table each spring.

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