A Windswept Building

A Windswept Building

I stumbled over an elevated sheet of concrete, not paying attention to where I was walking. I was staring at a building in the distance. It swayed, rocked, and wore the wind like a rock wears a stream. Conscious and ready to uproot at any moment, I disregarded the concept of safe, secure, mundane, and righted myself to continue toward the building. Crumbles of concrete discoursed and the long dead grass now brown with dirt spoke openly, disrepair had owned the land for some time. Many people spread around, walk by it daily, never questioning its unfulfilled duty or its old continence. The break with glossy painted doorways, shutters; lack of bright highlights made me eye the building questioningly. I felt immobilized by wonder, what if and why and who would be here? My mind raced for a new set of answers every moment, ignoring the fast framed steps and the rusted hinges and the broken glass covering my path. No more than through the gate and a strange man called from behind me,

“What are you doing?”

I was not bothered. No fear of retribution. He was no more owner than I, and it was apparent from the sound of his voice.

“I’m going inside. Want to come?”

His eyes spoke for him. He was watching me quizzically, confused. He had walked this path a thousand times, and never once watched a living being so close to the building. Ignoring the house became the norm; a background to the background that is the neighborhood where he commutes. The sky swore at him for stopping his march home, which reminded him of the unusual nature of having a pause in his step. Taken off course was not a part of life. To wrench free from dug trenches of daily existence held no space in his mind. So his eyes spoke for him before he gave his immediate answer

“No.”

I turned back and smiled. The joke of a soul born man. The mirror image he wants is not found in me. The same humor or retold stories, the facts stated in the same tone with the same inflection. Goodbye forever chap. He wouldn’t stop for this kind of scenario again.




I took the doorknob in hand. Dirty, untouched, unacknowledged for years. The time had come for the smallest restoration, and I turned the unlocked knob to open a bleached and cracked door. Inside was an immediate masterpiece. Fallen to pieces, entangled with webs and dirt piles and rodent shit. The walls held paintings of village squares, streams running through dense green forests, framed in dark wood now light with dust. Furniture adorned the corners. No dining table. Two open doorways held a new decision and I chose the closest one to me. Never the one to wait. Of course this brought me to a kitchen. Possibly untouched, possibly never finished. The linoleum curled at edges and swelled with underweight of a dying foundation. Cabinets stained with rorschach patterns inspired thoughts of birds and skylines and scented nostalgia.

I’d come too far. The house creaked nervously. Wind died in its attempt to enter through broken windows, rats scurried to established hideouts never used in their lifetime for more than hide-and-seek with their siblings. Disorder was a graceful lover of this building, it was not rummaged, not embarked on by some homeless friend or hobbyless children. Their was not mindless destruction throughout, nor visible at all. It was the tell of time and the lack of mindfulness that brought about this kind of rot. Like the slow whittling of a stump, or the course waves of sandstone hills. This was the work of daily nothings adding to become a spiraled weight. Concentric circles of withering skin and a wet mold recovering bits to grow life. Mentioned only to the mice and the birds and the dirt underneath. The watershed deep below melding stream to mud to concrete enslavement, bearing weight that folded lower toward truth once again. The perfect sphere of gravity pulled this tight bound net of unconscious disintegration.

The dishes were set away in one cupboard in an ironic display of a well kept home. There was no sorrow held in the hallways around. The bedrooms felt emptier than if they had no dressers pressed against the walls drizzled with humid concoctions. Spice danced on the floor, melded bits of sand and rock a thousand styles and colors. The brown floorboards hid unpacked groups of it. The sealed story was broken now, and whomever came next would feel a completely altered reality to the one I experienced. Every spectacle of forgotten life now remembered, and every bit of material now seen.

I walked slowly out the front door. The man had long left, and not one person slowed again as I shut the door behind me. The dirt lawn and disheveled gate framed a brightly lit day. Wind pushed me to look sideways toward a pitch white cloud, small and slow floating toward mountains off west. The sloth giant looked miniscule when compared to a curved earth.

As I shut the gate I wondered where I was headed pre-detour. The sidewalk lifted and fell with its sheets of old setting. Bent and broken by a weight underneath. My feet remembered to step high when necessary, and my eyes lay forward, surrounded by landscape well dressed with painted homes. Cars parked along curbs and people wandered to their next destinations.