She wanted to die.
He wanted to live.
•••
A hand grabbed onto my wrist, yanking me back just as the train rushed past, before I'd even had time to comprehend whether or not I'd carry out the action. I stumbled back into the person's chest, my hear...
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It was crazy how complex buildings were. How, like a human, different parts could feel and express different things.
The house I grew up in was a building once filled with such character, now stripped back to the bare necessities and carrying an unidentifiable persona. It was a building designed to be a home, but failed by its occupants and now served only as a means of shelter.
As Theo's eyes met mine I knew I didn't have the words to explain how it came to be like this: how a house had come to carry such distinct feelings of grief. From where we were stood, the doorless entrance to the living room beheld myriads of damages too painful to explain, with the kitchen straight ahead of us down the corridor and the staircase positioned to the left of us.
If I had to sum up what Theo was witnessing in an emotion, I'd say the living room was mourning.
Missing a leg, the wobbly coffee table leaned against the black sofa for support, mindless of the extra wrinkles it was adding to the worn leather covering the sofa. The TV remote was inconsolable, ripping itself apart with guilt as it lay dismantled across the floor. Its batteries crawled over to the base of the bookshelf, lined up like rows of tombstones seen from a passing car, and the bookshelf itself was a mountain of tape holding the broken structure together.
Perhaps the living room was mourning for what it once was: there used to be books on the bookshelf, a vase of flowers on the table, cushions on the sofa, photos in frames mounted on the walls, welcoming quotes on plaques and home décor - all of which could be manipulated and turned into ammunition for use against me.
It was the most innocent of beings that suffered the most in a war; the things that had no business being involved but were simply in the firing line - collateral damage that had to be cleared away. I didn't mean to strip away everything that made this house a home, but over time I found myself removing more and more until there was barely anything left.
In dismantling the weaponry that He had created, I had to eradicate all source of character in the space, leaving behind a scattered mess of needed items after removing all the ones that no longer served the purpose for which they had been there.
With one glance at the place you could tell it was missing something; it had loved and lost, mourning items that had once juxtaposed the permanently melancholy atmosphere. The room seemed dull without the sequin cushions that had left scratches across my face after being thrown at me; it seemed morose without the ornaments and mini carvings of animals that mum used to collect before they were used to make dents in the walls; it seemed lifeless without the stories stacked up in rows which wrote me letters of their own as pages were torn out and mismatched back together in the aftermath of an argument.
The living room was mourning the loss of love; the loss of everything that had left, the things which had once made it what it was. A 'living' room, not a dying one.
