If Walls Could Talk

I’d tell you: this is where we came alive. This home is where our voices raised. At least, yours did. Mine stayed quiet and stoic and I watched this world flourish in a symphony of sound and laughter, grief and scraped knees, as they fumbled their way through time and I stayed perfectly, beautifully still. This is where they walked through the door in black and white. I was grey, then. This is where the baby first walked. I was yellow. I was not a part of any of it, but I was, wasn’t I? I kept you safe, see. I was your home. I held your voices soft when they were loud and too sharp and the neighbors turned their heads, echoed back your child’s laughter so you would always remember the sound. I dressed myself in colors you’d like; felt you paint me, again and again, when the air felt stale; started more blank slate and ended more mosaic, if you cut me through the layers. I’m thankful you never did.

You cooked on the stove and the smoke signal rose like a greedy snake, broke its back against the sky. Your family would fold themselves into seats around a table I watched you build. I could see that you were weary, so I tried my best to keep the light against my skin and warm the room. Your wife held your hand and thanked you for a kind home and I would have smiled, if I could. People move and talk and I wonder if they will remember me: a house they played in when they were young; walls they hung their love on, hallways they careened down in a rush to the kitchen; somewhere they had holiday dinners and the floorboards groaned with the weight of joy.

I wish I could tell you how it felt to watch you grow. What an equisitely remarkable thing it is to be in the process of becoming. You are somehow both less and more permanent than I will ever be and, in some way, especially because you are noticed. You are moving and beautiful and I am both thrilled and horrified to be your audience. Either way, I am honored to keep you safe. I wish I could go with you when this story has tired and you can no longer carry your body up the stairs, when you shift your aching bones to a new shelter. I wish we both had more time.

And time is a funny thing, don’t you think? I crack, you wrinkle, we are much the same. I was root and sky, once; I was just like you. You hang clocks on me and we think we can track it but it slips so fast and hard away from us that we barely remember to look at them. I don’t regret this. I hope you don’t, either.

I wonder if the story after you will be as brave. Fall to its knees with such faith in God and forever and the ring in its hands. I wonder if it will notice, with as much grace, the harbor I am. I wonder if your story will be my last.

Like you, I was built for something I wasn’t prepared for. Be still, be whole, change only when its asked of you or weathered away by years. But I have been more beehive than anything. I have housed greatness. You, with your flailing limbs and stupid mistakes and relentless desire to love, are evidence of that. I am the walls in which you slept, and as such am an institution for dreaming. You, with your wild laughter, are the honey of this home. I wish I could tell you that.