Trying to Rebuild

If walls as old as this could talk, they might speak in slightly confused ancient Egyptian or perhaps sneeze at the dusty palm fronds that beckoned outside the entrance to the temple. That is, if they hadn't spent the last fifty years being tramped through by American visitors who flashed pictures on their cameras - and later iPhones. Slow to learn, the walls were used to being admired or ignored, and shivered as they were scratched upon with small metal picks by unsupervised children hieroglyphing their initials into insults or hearts in the odd and shadowed corners: AL + BJ. Haley is a b****.

The walls certainly had a moment to gossip about the man and woman who walked slowly under the archway, their eyes skipping over the tan blocks nearly as tall as they were. The stones saw the humans' dismissal and felt slightly out of sorts, almost as if they were judged and found wanting.

“Impressive,” the woman said to her husband in an insincere tone. He nodded, stooping to examine a string of hieroglyphs etched on the walls of the long corridor that stretched down into the darkened interior. When he said nothing in response, she pressed, “Don’t you think? It’s impressive, right?”

He grunted and ran his fingers along the dried paint of the incomprehensible lettering. The walls were glad fingers were used instead of the torturous metal implants of the younger generation - it was easy to clean a wall or repaint a glyph. It was harder to un-etch graffiti.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to touch that,” the woman said.

After a pause, the man took back his hand. But first, there had been that pause.

The walls noticed the woman opening her mouth to speak again, teeth gleaming like the moonlit sands over the Sahara. But she closed her lips over the words that popped up. Instead, she breathed quickly and loudly through her mouth like she was nearing the end of her third trimester. The walls had, at one point, contained children born to the chants of priestesses celebrating goddesses long forgotten. Forgotten by all but these stone blocks, who carried the hard and painful memory of divinity in their soul. A divinity the walls once bathed in, washed free each day from petty human concerns and housing only the highest of the noble priests.

Not these riffraff. Not tourists.

The man straightened and stepped away from the stone and down the corridor. He didn’t look back to see if she was behind him, and the walls tsked amongst themselves. So rude.

If glares could kill, the woman's eyeballs were picturing the Egyptian pyramid exploding from nuclear attack, with blocks tumbling down like an action movie and the crunch of impact as her husband’s philandering body became a Rorschach blot - one more corpse paying homage to the millennia of this structure’s existence. The stones shivered at the venom that flowed between the humans, although not one word was spoken.

Instead, the man quietly disappeared around the corner.

The walls echoed with the woman's odd panting. To humans, the woman might be considered old or fat. To the stones, she was a mere insect scuttling across their backs. Her concerns not their own, her anger something that could not touch them except as an idle curiosity. After they were moved from their first home, after being disassembled piece by piece (a painful process), and brought over in scattered shipments, and reassembled (sometimes upside down or on the wrong side of the wall), they had settled somewhat reluctantly into their new home. Although they would not have wished for a relocation, they had reveled in their new popularity - the walls that had been touched and loved and caressed so many centuries ago seeing new worship by these humans after many centuries of abandonment, new configurations of adoration by the multitudes as they heard "new exhibit" and "Egyptology wing" from many lips.

But the fight of two small humans? That meant nothing. Not to the man, not to the lost empire of this temple transported stone by stone to a foreign land and rebuilt for the edification of lovers of dusty and forgotten kingdoms. Lost lovers of history.

Lost loves.

The woman sighed. Touched the words she couldn’t read on the stone wall, her hand lingering where her husband’s had lingered. The stones, expecting to feel the shiver of a human's touch, instead felt nothing.

The exit was the same as the entrance. The woman waited for him here, her body leaning against the walls that whispered momentarily about her and dismissed her presence, as he did. Eventually, he would come back, of course - only to walk past her again.