It hits me really hard when I catch people beating themselves up for something. I can’t handle it, and will almost tear up, rushing to the defense of their worth and esteem against themselves, on their behalf. It his me because I do the exact same thing, almost constantly. But for some reason it doesn’t bother me to do it to myself. Only when I see others doing the same thing to themselves. Why is that?
I don’t hear my Dad anymore I recently noticed. After he died for the longest time I’d hear him calling my name anytime I walked into an empty room (not literally, like- a call from memory playing in my unconscious), just in greeting- the way he would anytime I walked into a room he was in. I’ve mentioned it before. It had the tone of a Nascar announcer describing someone in the race rounding the last corner. Very warm, present, and pleasantly surprised. It was like his death created this loud explosion of that atomized and routine exchange we had, echoing off the walls of my life, over and over, while slowly getting quieter and more faint as time marches on. And now I can barely hear it, once in a blue moon.
It’s so weird to me that things can just be “gone.” Things my memory knew to be real with every single one of my senses. Buildings are a bit like people to me. There is a life to them, even if it isn’t organic life. Yesterday I was driving past the church parking lot, the one my Dad helped me learn how to ride a bike in, and I was suddenly awash with sensory data on the great and massive three story Victorian brick school and boarding house that the assholes at the church decided to destroy for a list of all the dumbest reasons imaginable (profit and political pandering).
That building has been gone longer than my Dad, but even clearer than the smell of his Brut cologne and the feel of his stubble on my cheek, I can hear my footsteps pounding on the old wood of the school’s halls, echoing on the plaster walls. The deep creaking floors. I can smell the old basement concrete and the sickly sweet odor still present in the abandoned walk-in cooler. I can still feel the smooth handrails as I spiral up the steps to the tall narrow room with white shag carpet and a single hissing steam radiator. The room they took us with our sleeping bags for a nap every day in Kindergarten.
I look at the extra parking in the lot where the building used to be. Crazy how large buildings loom when they stand, and how small their footprint seems when they are razed. It just doesn’t compute in my head that it’s gone.
That anything is gone.
mirror self portrait from the 3rd floor the week before demolition
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