House of Pain

The winds you know so well and the ones I am learning the songs of blow through this place, this city village we each think of as our own for different reasons. The winds blow out of doors and yet they come inside here, through this house, swirling and sashaying among the bones and rafters of all that is left of a place that may have once been a home. They bring with them a chill so comprehensive it remains in the house even when I throw open the curtains and the sun shines in. The house radiates cold in this generally hot place, and amazingly it doesn’t appear to be a feat of ingenuity in engineering. It’s as though all the passion that once lit it up with the fires of your love and rage for each other imploded into some supernova and was sucked out into some dark hole. And all that remains is this particular dark abyss.

This house is yours but it is I who dwell here. Maybe not live in it, but stay in it, hold keys to, refer to and use the same form of the verb I use to describe my own home in my village when people ask me where I stay. In this house we exist amongst the chaos and destruction of your former life. I wander through hallways and sleep in rooms with ghosts and I find myself in the shambles of someone else’s broken past. I call it yours, and know it is, and yet you’re not here, and all I can see of you in it is the sadness that descends onto your shoulders as you walk through the door. We can all tangibly feel it but on you I can actually see it. It trails behind you and drips down on you and threatens to suffocate you and I can’t free you from it no matter how I might want to try.

Despite being full of people this hallow empty wind makes the house seem vacant. I try to fill it, with people and food and laughter and light and music but the oppressive darkness always pushes through. The memories or pain or something I can’t quite see clearly follows us all around like shadows, if that were possible in the darkness. I can’t see it or name it or fix it or change it because it’s not mine, and for once I don’t want to.

The person I used to be would have picked up the broken and scattered pieces of you, meticulously cleaned them and forced them back together in the way I saw fit. I’d have created the image that I wanted to see, rather than waiting for you to reveal yourself to me or learning the one that is you, as you are, who you were. I’d do it; if for no other reason than to ignore the broken shards of me that are what really need healing and repair. Alternatively I’d look as deeply within you as you’d let me, I’d dig and pick and excavate and find some deep seated potential and I’d fall in love with it, not the you you are but the person I could see you becoming if only, if only- whether you wanted to become it or not.

We are each here in this house, this freezing house, together, two bodies, two beings, mostly alone together. Occasionally we bump into each other in the darkness. Sometimes we run directly at each other full speed smashing ourselves together in some attempt to avoid the dark and the shadows, hoping between the two of us to create some spark that can chase away this dark and this cold and this pain. We cling to each other for warmth and yet we feel nothing through this numbing, encompassing cold. You touch me, but I can’t feel you.

We’re in this house, the broken pieces in each of us here scattered around us. Yet we are not completely able to connect, to fill the cracks and chasms, to help each other become whole again. I rub the salve on your hands, hoping that in some way it can reach your broken heart. I wish it could sooth and heal you for your own sake. I know I’m not it, I never was and never could be but I can’t witness the ways you ache and not feel pain myself and want relief of some sort, for both of our sakes.