stuck with old eyes

Walking through so many buildings, you get stuck with old eyes.

When you’ve seen enough of them you see a pattern, and with enough imagination you can see what any building looks like when abandoned, can see the boards fallen, the floor trashed, the beer bottles, the cast-off clothes, the graffiti and the plants. It starts to haunt you, in a way; you realize every building you enter is in a clean bubble in time, as are you. You’ve seen its future and you see that nothing is sacred.

After a weekend in Detroit exploring the Packard Plant (the largest abandoned building in the world)  I felt that that world was so different than my own. And I came back to find the floor of my apartment had fallen through, the price we pay for an unquestioned sense of stability. Even as I write the balcony I sit on is crumbling, is falling under my weight, the wood used to build it is a dead tree dying further. In a sense all we build is made of dead things.

What I love is that you’d reach a floor in the Packard Plant that had damage from water and fire and as a result there was a carpet of moss, a young tree, stalactites of dripping minerals from the ceiling and pools of hard, glossy calcite on the floor. Every death is the womb of another living thing, and maybe it’s us who are the only murderers, living in our dead-tree houses, burning dead organisms for fuel. What strange creatures we are, although shouldn’t be egotistical enough to see us as any different from the rest.