Abandoned, Locked, Forgotten

Photo courtesy of ALTARWORK

It’s the ache late at night when the endless blank sky looms down at you from an icy window. When your heart cries out for warmth and you attempt everything to stir the embers in your ashen soul.

It’s the empty room that’s left in shambles, abandoned in the years of decay and lack of attention. In the wilting scent of mold underneath rotten floorboards, dust an inch thick stitched around cupboards. The eerie silence that hovers heavy across the air. You survey the remnants of a life once lived, of a soul that used to long and dream and feel. When you cross to unlatch a window slapped shut to keep in the staleness, you step on the broken pieces of your heart scattered across the floor. Funny how you forgot this is where they landed. Funny you even ventured down here, when it’s been a door you’ve refused to cross into for years.

Fingers leave a darkened streak across the wood-stained chair as you swipe the dust dancing in the air, taking a seat where you used to sit with saucer in your hand, cup raised to your lips while steam swirled across your skin. From the square of open window, the brightness of light squeezes your eyes; their shape narrows them to slits. You haven’t allowed the breeze to flow across this room, or for echoes of leaves brushing against the wind to settle in your ears, even to simply stare across a slanting curve of land dimpled by long grass. It’s unfamiliar territory you trek, trepidation at the unexpected way your heart stalled in the doorway, the way you pushed through by some inexplicable compulsion.

A distant, foreign feeling flutters within your breast. Remembrance. How you used to sit and stare out this window at the world moving just past your arm’s extension, colors mingling and streaks of sunlight giving miniscule details a glisten, as dew dripped upon the dawn. How your heart would smile, letting in your dreams and placing them tenderly in line around its chambers. How you believed in your core, that youthful, sparkling core, that anything in this universe was possible.

The clock patched on the green painted wall ticks, one beat after the other, keeping rhythm with the pulse of your heart. It’s an internal battle to stay where you are. Sitting still is a luxury you no longer afford yourself. Still the tiny hands tick on, soothing away the restlessness.

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