Who we are in the dark...
No map can depict the distance between all the ways we shift and change, from where we begin to what we could be. Between the ground and what gets built. No blueprint for the absences. For what we will endure. For what we will learn. No floor plan for the eventide hours. The immensity, the mystery, the strength. Sometimes we have no other choice but to discover ourselves in the dark, "like an abandoned house", Stuart Turton says, something lost, found, and reclaimed.
Sometimes there is no other way.
From threshold to threshold, we step through entry ways and rooms. Closets, doors, and walls. A residence covered in night. Present and estranged. Familiar and astray. We trace the edges of our openness. The grain of our enclosed space. The parts that have collapsed. Those that remain. The ones that can still be saved.
We let ourselves feel the bigness of everything. The emptiness, the longing, the ache. The foundation, the structure, the bones. Whatever it may be. Our sensitivity is a strength. The reality of our condition is not always painless, but at least it's something we can embrace. A somatic system of understanding. Something we can touch. Something with texture. Something we can learn to face.
No matter how weathered. No matter how lonely or scarred. We are a marvel of architecture and engineering. These self-healing wounds. This reshaping heart. This living ghost of who we've been and who we are. The capacity to be taken down to almost nothing, to be rebuilt, to be renovated, to be renewed.