But a Flower Grows

A few months ago I woke with a broken heart bleeding like eyelids over my face. I spun web in the corners of my mind, already covered in dust. I crippled myself with uneven floors and broken rafters.

I made a mess of this, my once great Soulscape home. I drop low like a raptor, stalking the darkened halls where candles once lit, pecking around waxy sconces and charred molding. It is a wild place. I wonder what it used to be. I remember where the steeples used to be, where the decorations fell to mud on the floor.

Now I leave little graves behind me, where the sentimental things once grew. Where the shapes of the once-living now moulder and stand testament to the death of some branch of me. Some wing of my mansion. Perhaps every wing of my mansion. North, East, South, West. And the watchtowers, too, falling.

And this wing’s decay is beautiful too. It must fall away, like the House of Usher. It must rot and decay and slide into the bog, the mire. And I must tend to it as it goes. I must clean the ant-lines from clean carpet. I must mend the jagged wood along the healthy halls. I must collect the little graves for later use, line them in one, long, memorial hall. For even they are precious, beneath grandiose photographs and dreams of what had come, and what will never grow. Alongside old knittings and worn-out clothes already bygone to a lost decade.

Beside a similar, unlit hall from another extended lesson. And another. Beside my childhood, one for each year lived. Beside my high school years, my Boy Scout years, my college years. To where the other hearts were broken. To where my little graves hurt my eyes much more to gaze upon. And younger, far younger, where the frozen waterfalls of filth still glisten like stalactites from unrealized nightmares.

And the deaths. But those are a different place. Shrines, small, iron-gilded windows facing overcast skies, tiles that echo tap-taps as if every breath were a stiletto heel.

But it grows, purple, between sullen boards and green carpet.