First comes the phoenix, then the historian--I don't see much difference in the two of us, as we both transcend the actual occurence. We just appear at different times: while you're burning out, I'm stalling. I pick through the ashes once you're dead.
This time, they're waiting in the car for me as I pick through the debris of some forgotten church off the Interstate. This is my game, now, and I belong to any broken building across the state. I've been digging for two years now, been lying for the same.
This chapel has its name spray painted out, leaving only the simple announcement of "baptist church" against its white wooden sides; poison oak chokes away at the pillars and stone stairways out front. It's not as though there'd be any doubt, though--it screams Baptist, from the gaudy red-carpet guts to the two front pews that appear never to have been utilized. That's all over now, though. Nobody meets here, not on purpose. The roof has ruptured, leaving the ceiling tiles coughing out the remnants of hymns, scriptures, dead saints, and insulation--the remnants of the worship of an awesome God. The pulpit is just a podium now, commonplace with common names carved into its rotting wood. Lucky churches end up like this one, all honest and broken; all the others just let the cancers eat away at them silently until all the members have turned to dust. I shudder at my own sacrelige.
The piano is in decent shape, though its keys have been well-played and are missing the occasional ivory. I sit down to inspect it closer, resting my fingers upon the cool white tiles. They're sticky with spilled beer now and the guilty can on the bass notes is still overturned. Ants teem in and out, in and out. I strike the keys again and again, a simple hymn to anyone who may be listening.
The first real poet of the twentieth century died not long ago, but the newspapers didn't notice her... Every day I visited her sickbed, every day for a year. I watched the eloquent, beautiful belle wither away into a pallid child incapable of speech. I watched her dig her fingers into her curls, repeating the same word over and over as she rocked herself to sleep.
I know it hurts. I'm sorry.
But none of my sorrow could fix it. Nothing I did could kill the pain or bring back the late nights of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune on her television as we ate frozen blueberries from the previous season. There'd be no more sweet tea, no more sweet dreams after she tucked me into the spare bedroom's too-hot darkness.
I always waited until I couldn't hear her stirring in the kitchen outside that door before I kicked the blankets off and flung my young arms and legs across the sheets in a desperate attempt for coolness in the face of that Mississippi heat pounding on my window. I wanted to learn her trade, her grace and splendor; I never wanted to give in.
I never did. I was there when the morphine wore off, when they told me to say goodbye, when she died. There wasn't anything beautiful or spectacular about it--I lost someone important to me, but the pain stopped for her. They told me I was too hard, too honest, because I didn't pretend that the body that I saw before she died was the same one that held me when I cried as a child. She'd died a few months back, but everyone was too busy watching her chest rise and fall to notice. Everyone's sorry, but nobody's sorrow can fix it. It's human life, the circle. It's brutal. It hurts.
Still.
As I sit in this church, playing the piano for the ghosts and the saints and anyone else who will listen.
My feet itch from the stupid plants outside the door and my eyes sting with stupid tears.
I want to burn this place down, destroy everything beautiful I've found within it. I want someone to notice how bad things have become and how rotten to the core this place is. My heels creak against the floorboards and I stomp them out. I carve obscenities into the paint with my keys. I throw hymnals through the stained glass windows, out into the underbrush. I hope they rot like bodies and the ants find their way to them
down between the ivory slats
to eat them alive, leaving nothing but a memory of a song we used to sing on the front porch as the sun set behind the hills.


Only sleeping, sweetly sleeping,
While the angels vigil keep;
Jesus gives to His beloved
Rest at last in peaceful sleep.

Labels: ants, church, hurt, old buildings