Eulogy for the House

Creative Non-Fiction Piece

Looking from the outside, I saw time crashing through the trees and into the city I grew up in. It flew through its walls, breaking all windows and doors open, roaring with the sound of a ghostly wind cracking through a forest of concrete. It went through my grandparents’ house in the old town, the park, my old school, and my sister’s house. It peeled its paint and bent its beams with swift delicate motion. It stripped its bones clean as the roaring faded away. An ocean of white bones on an endless yellowed grass plane with a few leafless trees stood motionless and silent. It reminded me of the time I found a whale carcass one Sunday afternoon after spending hours whale-watching. Its skeleton, missing a couple of ribs, was as big and ancient as a ruin. Its whole life reduced to the faint smell of decay and ocean. The empty city and the carcass, the remains of two great beasts, stared at me the same way. As if they were waiting for my return to realize how brief their life really was, and in return how brief mine was. They invited me in. I sat for some time inside the carcass. My legs hugged into my chest and my feet curled in.