everything must go.

this used to be a home once, not just a house, not just skeleton bones of wood in a field in a town. you can tell it used to be a home, because see the wallpaper? its yellow and it peels and is so old that it may have been one of the first wallpapers made, but its there. and see the sofas? they used to be creme white, now they are an ugly yellow, jaundiced eye, but they have lovely patterning on them that used to be burgandy but now is three or four shades down. maybe the mother polished the wood once a week but now it stands rotted, same with the big table in the room next door that you can see from the holes in the rotted drywall. i would sit on the couch, but no one has sat on it in a while, because a spring angry and violent pushes through the destroyed chair.
so i walk past into the room with the table, which i can almost almost almost imagine the family eating dinner together, maybe. and into the next room which is dark and horrible and has only a small ragdoll thrown in the corner and books that are falling off the spines. the books smell awful, like old water or dust or the slightly sweet smell of something decaying. and so i push the door closed and leave the room to the spiders and go on.
something flutters, up in the rafters, something pretends to claim this place, this falling apart place, these skeleton bones, this once a home collection of sticks.

and the thing is this place was once so important, it housed joys and fears and hope and laughter and family but now it sits forgotten. soon it will turn to dirt and dust and fall apart, make its groaning way back to the earth, whether on its own or with human aide remains to be seen but it is clear; this home has been given up on. the family either moved away or fell apart.
and i'd like to imagine that they moved away in a happy sort of state but the furniture, the furniture, the yellowed and crumbling pictures and the tarnished silverware that is inexplicably sitting in the middle of what used to be a childs' room floor, begs to differ. the leftover decay of a home quietly scream that something happened, something happened, something that made the family abandon the house completely, that the memories were too painful to pack and carry with them so they left them, left them to be found, by a nineteen year old girl fifty years later.
and i'd like to imagine now that i knew something, anything, about this family but i cant. all that i known is that this house hurts me in the pit of my stomach, it is haunted in the worst way, haunted by all the possibilities of what could've and should've been and i can't even imagine what quiet monster made the family leave their home this way.