Little balls of cotton strewn across the floor of a shabby studio apartment. Remnants of a love-hate battle that stretched on for years, ended in silence and isolation. A burnt and dirty spoon, several, tiny gauge syringes and the personal effects of a lost soul that used to have a name. Here is a photo of a happy child and a woman who could be his mother. Careworn and faded, nameless and forgotten. Just throw it into the bag with the rest of the trash.
It’s not a mystery. How many other apartments in this building have played the stage to this story? The dim halls with the red and black checkerboard tiles and flickering fluorescent lights are choked with the ghosts of the sad and lonely people who took their, last desperate gasp in a cell of chipped plaster and peeling paint. The walls speak of a desperation and longing, hearts that are always empty. Even in daylight, the pall of hopeless release darkens every corner of this space. “Never enough” is the whisper in the cobwebs and shadows.
These shrines to tragedy and regret were at first shocking. I held the picture in my hands for fifteen minutes, sure that the person in the picture would come in and say “Don’t throw that away!!! That is my only picture of my mom!!!” but I just stood there staring at the people in the picture, realizing that they were lost forever. So it went into a bag along with a pair of shoes and a blanket that might have been this guy’s last treasured possession after trading everything else for the dirty, warm embrace of the love that comes in little blue waxen envelopes. “Don’t Try” was the stamp on the few scattered around my feet. Desperately torn and pilfered for every last grain of brown powder. Somewhere, the devil is laughing at the irony.
What could make someone drift so far from shore? Were they modern day Icarus who flew to close to the sun? Did the holes in their hearts become so large that they were swallowed whole? So many of these little vignettes telling the same, short story. A different, person in each picture, but always some vestige of the warm, happy person who set out and became just another specter, haunting the corridors of this blighted death house. A teddy bear waits on a mattress for the loving arms of the lost child that will never return.
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