This is was my place.

The first thing that strikes me is the smell. Familiarity is a stench, emanating from a rubbish dump next to the building. I have always imagined recollections to be made of freshly painted walls, now faded, or perhaps a poster that managed to stand the test of time. Something that comes back with my sense of sight, not smell. I discover familiarity changed jobs when I wasn’t looking. From a shrink, it has now donned the role of a teacher.

The silence is audible. Not absolute. Furniture creaks and birds chirp cautiously in a hushed rebellion. My breathing is the only human intervention. I find all sorts of dead life on the edges of the room. Flies that have become shriveled grey balls of tiny limbs and other indistinct features. Wings, various sizes and types, lie scattered, abandoned by their owners. Dust motes catch the light of a dying sun, only to settle back into their uneventful life. The dust motes remind me of me.

I am a dust mote.

There is a distinct sense of loss here. A loss of people. A loss of intention. A loss of reason that let people abandon a historical building and let it fall to ruins. A loss of touch, a deliberate termination of having to do anything with this place. A loss of the old me that existed along with this institution in its younger days.

It has never been personal, not until now. I touch the walls and they throb with anecdotes of incidents that happened within them. I want to hear them out, I really do. But we don’t speak the same language. At a focal point in the time gone by, where our pasts converged, we understood each other without the need to talk. They knew me and I, them. We were more than an acquaintance. A warming presence in each other’s life.

The sky is bleeding red when I walk out. A bitter realization dawns upon me, right on the precipice of a beautiful sunset. Walking back and hoping to get on a page in history that once existed only stirs up emotions that take longer to settle than dust motes. All that is left is an illusion of a memory, a hack job done by the brain, a pretention that it remembers. The place I owned within these walls does not exist anymore. Perhaps it never did. The only thing that will continue to tie me to this place is a belief.

And a brief moment in time.