Tear Down

My grandmother’s house was built one year after the neighbor’s, but you would never know looking at it. It is by definition a tear-down. Unlike her neighbors, grandma lost the will to take care of it after my grandpa died. The exterior which had once been a crisp white has peeled and browned through the decades of neglect. My sister used to say, “This house is cursed. It has bad juju.” The interior was just as run down as the outside, but it was just harder to see. It had always been dark inside. Overgrown garden bushes covered the windows and blocked what little light might have found its way in. The only room that had enough light to read by was the living room, and that’s where my father’s cracked leather chair sits empty.

My sister and I sat on the couch staring out onto the immaculate golf course. Its pristine cut grass hills always provided a stark contrast to the overgrown weed covered lawn of grandma’s house. “I’m never coming back to this fucking house” she whispered to me. Tears streaming down our faces, we both knew that it was a lie. A lie that verbalized the aching emptiness we both felt. I had lost all of my words. I wanted to tell her that I hated this house just as much as she did, but my words were swallowed before they could pass my lips. All I could muster was a half-hearted nod, so we sat in silence. A silence made even more deafening by the fact that he was missing, and that we would never hear his voice again.

I was so tired, but I couldn’t sleep. I laid my head on the couch cushion, the gold threading on the damask was worn and frayed. My father used to love this couch. You could usually find him lounging on it after a long day. When I was little, I used to crawl up onto his belly while he napped. Nestling into his warm chest to hear his heartbeat. I tried to deeply inhale the fabric but all I could smell was the old house. It hadn’t held his scent or his warmth, and my sniffs became guttural sobs. I so wanted to feel closer to him, but like the house he was fading away. All of our memories were tainted by the peeling wallpaper and moldy stench of a forgotten home. I used to laugh at my sister but maybe she was right, maybe this house is actually cursed.

Any reasonable person would look at this house and know that it isn’t worth saving. Even I will begrudgingly admit it. Like my father, the house has past the point of fixing, the mice and mold have undermined it like the cancer that ravaged him. I used to love this house, even the parts that were falling apart, because it was the one place that I could see my father. But with him gone that love has faded and twisted into anger. I hate this cursed house. I hate walking through its dark rooms and seeing its empty furniture. But most of all I hate how it reminds me of the pain and suffering that we all went through on that day summer day.

Now that he’s gone there’s no reason not to sell the house. Though the neighbors are “sad for our loss”, you can tell they are counting the days till a crew can come in a demolish it. Who can blame them? It would certainly bring up their property values to get rid of this crumbling mess. Yet, I feel a different pain at the thought of it being reduced to a pile of bricks and dust. Even though I hate this place, I respect it as the last place my father took his final breaths to whisper his love for us, his family. It is a place that hold many memories, and for that reason alone I will be sad the day it is sold and torn to the ground. As I make the long drive back to my own house, I can’t help but hope that the old hovel will stand for a little longer. Maybe just enough time for me to patch the cracks and put myself back together.