Dear Nameless Grandma

This was kind of a quick scribble that blew up after an emotional conversation with a close friend.

I've become more outgoing as in I am more going out than going in

With friends or responsibilities at some point I have less outgoing and more ingoing

As in going into my house.

And the way I go home is by getting a ride from someone.

Every time someone see's my house for the first time they exclaim

"Its beautiful! I wish I had a house like that. It must be awesome inside!"

But to me your pleas of genuinely jealous glee

Are something that fills me with disgust

To me that not so humble abode you see

Is the cavernous cave filled with totems and idols, knick-knacks and trinkets, family heirlooms of no one I know,

That is nothing but unfilled space.

And when your surrounded by that much space the only thing left to fill it is your own mind.

I don't know what dotted line I signed on what contract that binds me to this place of such loneliness

This place was made for a family when only a half of them are in it.

This place that was made for a family that never really was a family in it to begin with

This place that I stew in like a cell that I'd write the blues in if I could yell

That I lose myself in, can't you tell?

I wish I'd had things that mattered to me that surrounded me like the nightstand next to my bed

Made for a child's growing head to write down the math they'd get in school

For the books that they hadn't read and the drawings they thought were cool

This piece of childhood nostalgia living next to me while I cannot rest

Is at best the thing I put glasses full of liquids that depress while I lay there in distress

What did you do with your desk? Fable family from forever ago

What story stories could you redress, that involve the nightstand to my west

What was your name? How old were you? Did you like? Where'd you get it?

Was it a handmedown? Why is it something next to be bound?

In this house that at night has no sound because no emotions rocked it till cracks wrecked it to the ground

So no creaks are creaking and no breaks can be found on the cell walls or concrete doors

That at night always end up being pound until sometime before four

When I give up the hopes of ever being saved before I drown in this ocean of bore.

Books treated like treasured tapestries tattering the tops of my refrigerator.

You have things written into you that give me chills. Dates. Names. Heart warming words.

"Merry Christmas Grandma"

Books treated like forgotten idols held on a pedestal higher than the eye-line

Why are you all the way up there above the skyline?

Why are you trapped away like memories on the tip of someone's tongue

Trying trepidatiously to travel out of someone's lung

To be heard like a forgotten story that wishes to be sung?

Dear Nameless Grandma,

When your funeral occurred and the bells had rung

How many people, old and young, showed there faces to see you in a casket hung?

How many of them gave you books like the three we didn't give away?

How many of them gave you looks like the kind of looks that would say

I know you and you had an impact on my life and I will miss you forever

I will miss you on my wedding day, I will miss you when the college loans are all paid

I will miss you when on Christmas I got you a book and brought it to the family party when it should have stayed

On a bookshelf in a bookstore where I stood poor but felt I should at least find a way

To buy beloved grandmother a gift for Christmas day.

Even though you'll never go to one of those parties again.

Dear Nameless Grandma,

I wish I could have met you. I think you're my great great grandmother.

I have three books that belonged to you. I wish we kept more. Because out of all the things

Lying depressingly on a surface they're the only three that have surfaced to have sufficed to say

That they aren't just something purchased to spice up the dayroom.

They're more impactful than the Ikea bookshelf filled with books for teens

Covered in trophies I got for joining the team, trophies that no one got one and beamed.

They're more impactful that the various metal fabrications hanging from the wall

Like the six above my family room that never sees more than two people together

Like the one in The front atrium that sees only one person enter.

Like the things on the shelf when you go up the stairs to the second floor

That are only witnessed when going down them groggily when gluttonously one overslept.

They're more impactful than the rest of the things that make my kitchen pretty.

They're more impactful than every painting hung on the walls strung up on screws dug into them

They're more impactful than all.

And yet they're just sitting there, precariously procured on their perch

Poised patiently and possessively passively protesting possible passable fates.

Dear Nameless Grandma,

You didn't live here. You've never seen where here is.

You never met anyone living here. You don't know the legacy of your legacies. Why are your things here?

Why are these various handmedowns and passalongs residing in my abode.

Why are they in my beautiful home?

Sincerely,

How can anyone call this house beautiful when the only thing that fills it is feeling of being alone?