Dead’s Justice

She was a house. She was the house at the end of the street, dwarfed by all the others, forgotten, and alone. The lawn around her, overgrown with wild lilacs and coneflowers the color of old pink toenail polish, ate up her front porch until no one went in anymore.

I remember when she wore all black and white, a modern beauty of cold sophistication. I remember when she first dyed her hair the color of the richest mahogany. And I remember when she stabbed herself in the mouth to make her lips as red as her skin was pale.

Those days she was more a room than a house, one already furnished with leather couches and carpet that felt like whipped cream on my feet. She had such high ceilings that on winter nights, it seemed there was no ceiling at all. Her fireplace burned with fresh kindling, the brightness of her eyes.

However, she began to change. The shift was strange, a widening of sorts. She expanded and in doing so, pushed me away. I found myself thrust into the seasons beyond her skylights and windows. Suddenly, there was weather, storms of brilliant gold and blue, the taste of mist and snow upon my tongue. I danced naked, always naked, with the grass chasing my feet and the leaves whispering secrets in my lonely ears. I loved Mother Nature.

Yes, a lapse in my memory, a lapse in remembrance of the way things used to be, greenish, lifeless, a hospital without patients, a dead bird with no wings, occurred in my lack of thought.

In the time of firsts outside her cherry, chocolate, white ice-cream cake world, I did not think at all. I was thing of wind and freedom, embracing the sky as my air and the ground as my bed. I was a beast, returned to my rightful place at the earthy center of all that be.

But I could not remain so.

On all nights, I was the only being that spoke my new language.

It was then that I remembered that I lived in a world full of boundaries. These boundaries were not those that I inflicted upon myself because I wanted to suffer. No, they came because I refused to embrace madness, but instead reality.

More than I wanted life itself, I longed to return to the simple stage between my four-walled existence and my new realizations.

More than I wanted anything, I longed to go back just a few hours in time, when the night was still a cloak and the stars still sang with the moonlight on the lake.

I thought then that perhaps if I closed my eyes for long enough, slept for long enough, I would sleep away an eon and find myself again in a world that I did not understand.

I wanted to be without herb gardens locked in square boxes and people locked in rectangle boxes. I wanted to be in a world where my love for wildfire and destruction came naturally through drought and dry air. I wanted the deepest crime to end in the regeneration of the Earth.

Yes, I looked down on my Mother Nature and wept great salt tears. I cried tears for the dying flowers at the beginning of fall. I wept while the nightingales screamed their last free coos’ in the hunter’s air, and I prayed to my silent Mother Nature who died all around me. I prayed that I find her again in the ruin of her skin.

At the end of my lamentations, I stood before a lock, which I could not pick.

She was a house now.

She towered over me with windows keeping their secrets shut behind dark blinds. She blocked what was left of the sun, a terrible stain of my memory on my stained heart. She stood a reminder of the world I had once embraced. Yes, she was the cold steel in the warm wilderness, the harsh weatherer of all elements, the monstrosity of straight lines between natural circles.

I would have cried had my eyes known wetness and my throat screams; but, no, I was left to glare at what I could not change while silence stole my breath away.

I knew then that I was going to die by my own hands. I could wait no longer for the pungent release of Earth all around me. I could not wait for the maggots in my hands and the worms between my teeth. I would not decompose at her pretend mercy.

She pushed me away from her tiled hallways and mosaic tables. She thrust me into a trashcan full of the leftovers of the world. She gave me to the cruel, unrelenting crash of the polluted tide.

From her tender words that meant nothing, she taught me the lesson that I held no cards in my own fate. I was the ultimate pawn in someone’s simulation, a plaything of thorns and less than sweetness only sometimes.

Now, as I float along the stream of my black sky, I watch her when evening falls. The shadow of once black and white, now grey, surrounds her chimney and peeling walls. The wrinkles in her foundation and the furrows in her roof show me that she is fading now as I did. I feel her great sorrow well up around the other houses as they boost their own size and ever more complicated inhabitants. Now she is the one shoved from the Earth as the Earth overtakes her. Just once I wish I could reach down and whisper as she lingers in a world that has forgotten her. I want to ask her if she remembers me as I remember her, but I stay silent and wait for the time when the stars sing to her as they once sang to me, when the end is near and she still has yet to realize it.