Pride is placed in our buildings during erection. Apparently shame is part of the deconstruction. Shame that the owner couldn't cut the rent. Shame business went bad. Shame a family suffered to make ends meet. Shame quality started to hit the floor. Shame the community couldn't care enough, much less come together.
Love is always so hot and bright. Like candlelight dancing in the rain, red and orange, thrashing in the wind, persisting. Love is the wonder which keeps us sad ghosts haunting one another. Like moths, we hunger to be consumed in its flames.
Death is usually a quiet ordeal, even for businesses and buildings. Visiting the corpses along the roadway is a decision often worth making. Seeing a husk in such a vulnerable state reminds us of how fragile our lives are; how fragile, this social contract.
In times of war, when bombs rain down upon towns, and gunfire rattles through the tin-pan alleys, much love is lost and never regained. Death gladly fills those voids. Afterward, the stoic survivors eschew the tender things, the memories, the hope. Buildings once loved and revered become as diseased things, painful memories, cystic lumps near the road. Yet, coping is often more important.
But how strange that in times of peace, we should ignore these old flames and soft relics. Are we really so programmed to forget? Perhaps the sulfur lights extinguished when they locked the front doors? So many hours spent somewhere only to miss it on your drive by.