We All Struggle With Forward Motion

It's frightening to wake up one day, instead of being in your bed, to be lying naked on the dirt upon which your house once stood. The walls that you spent so much time propping up, the furniture you spent time amassing... it never was a very beautiful house, with crooked door frames and uneven floorboards. The paint never really matched and the roof had torrential leaks on bad days. But this is where you lived, spent all your time trying to install support beams to keep it standing, nailing patches to the holes in the ceiling... this is what you had tried so hard to build for so long.

You gave them permission to take it down because day after day, they reminded you that it didn't pass the inspection codes. It was unsafe and unsightly. On the good days, the beams of sun that escaped through the cracks and holes brought life to the damp rooms, a romantic picture worthy of being mounted with a silver frame. But when it rained, it was so damn cold, and no memory could comfort the bones of such a dense reality.

You gave them permission to bulldoze it. You gave it up willingly, because your hands had forgotten what anything other than the heaviness of a hammer felt like, and your skin had grown pale with the dark.

You gave it up, but you never expected the wind to howl so eerily or the ground to be so empty. The weeds that grew at the feet of the foundation now brush against a damp line in the dirt. When all that's ever surrounded you were your falling walls and broken windows, not having them as the very last musings of night and the very first stirrings of morning can make you wonder how one can fill this unnerving vacancy...