A Ghost of Words

Italo Calvino said: The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts. Buried deep in a field this house stands.  It stands against the wind and the neglect.  But more than that it stands against the family who has lived inside of it.  The family who fought, screamed, yelled, cursed each other to the ground.  It started easily enough, they went to Church, they prayed but then he lost his job and she started crying… because she knew that one day everything they had – their marriage, their life, their happiness – would be gone.  Things started to slip away from them they had nothing to eat, they had nowhere to go except this house. Every night they sat across from each other but words didn’t come because words were ghosts.  The world had taught them that life was hard, that things broke and that some things that broke could never be fixed.  They left each other, they defined their reasons inside their minds and they never said goodbye.

So this house stands alone.  It knows the words that are whispered right before a goodbye are the words that haunt people their entire life.  Because those whispered words are ghosts representing a life you cannot get back.  This house knows what it means to fall apart, to be abandoned.  It knows what life would have looked like if those words were never whispered.  It knows that broken things can always be fixed.

Image credit: “love Don’t live here anymore…” – © 2009 Robb North – made available under Attribution 2.0 Generic