Abandoned

Behind my parents’ house stood a small abandoned building, with peeling paint that bore the burden of its weight and age. My brother and I sometimes rode our bikes up to that place while the crisp autumn wind blew the scent of the house’s rotting wood through our hair. Most days we only loitered outside and shuddered at its brazen audacity to so blatantly be forsaken and somehow still be standing. Other days I ventured inside with a pulsed feeling in my stomach, the same feeling that comes when my feet leave a ledge into the depths of something deep and dark below. Except instead of a cushion of water breaking my fall, the depths of that house engulfed me with boxes of moldy books and ripped gingham dresses still hanging in a closeted tomb. Rarely did my brother dare follow me in. He kept reason in those haphazard moments of bravery and fool-hearty leaps I took into the unknown. I can still hear his voice from outside yelling, “Carly, come on! We’re going to get in trouble.” And even now I smile at his caution and innocence. Unlike my brother, I felt that house call to me at the most unlikely of moments. It haunted me. I became obsessed with it, with its genuine character and utter lack of attention. I wanted to go to it more than my brother or any of our friends who dared venture there with us. Eventually I even went alone, relishing in the solitude. I stood outside and looked upon it in wonder. I can close my eyes now and still see the unruly weeds encompassing its parameter, locking arms and holding its mystery back from me. 

I cannot recall why it was that I so desperately needed to visit that house as much as I did. Perhaps I held the conviction that if I did not visit it, who would? Maybe I felt that the secrets of a house once lived in and left to rot offered so much more to my growth as a human being than the houses still cared for and lived in. Or most likely of all, I probably felt in the depths of myself, the old boxes of unsaid thoughts and wasted energy and love, looked similar to that old house’s old contents. I knew its loneliness. I understood it.

There’s just something about old, abandoned houses that speaks of the human condition. Their closed windows muffle the hush of the stagnant dust that clings to all its contents, dust heavy with skin particles of lovers, laughing children, and bitter men in rocking chairs. Wipe a finger across the top of a white-washed curio cabinet laden with the dust of forty years and possess the remnants of breath once breathed in vibrant lungs. 

For some reason, a reason I will never pretend to know, these houses are left behind. I don’t know what catastrophes or circumstances lead a person or family to leave behind their home and never returned. Honestly, it’s not the question of “why” that bothers me. It’s the statement of “I don’t want you.” The idea that a person can so easily throw off and forsake something with such ease, without even a backward glance. Years of a life accumulate in a home, filling our bookshelves, our drawers, and our comfy nooks with possessions that define us in a lot of ways. How does a person decide what is most valuable out of these knick-knacks and comforts? What is it that influences a person to decide, “These things do not make the cut”? What of those possessions left behind? What of that life forgotten? It’s left to age in a dilapidated structure, never more to be appreciated except by the maggots and spiders who creep through the cracks.