If you were looking for a side street to get there, you’d be disappointed. It’s not like that anymore. It’s a ‘house’, not a ‘home’. The future has grown up around it, piling on top of it mounds of inspiration, newness and memories until it was forgotten beneath the accumulated past.

I’ve heard it said once the bright eyed and bushy tailed soldiers who first met with the innovations of war and machinegun fire found themselves piled up at the end of their conclusion. Hours; days maybe, of un-ending fire until they were stacked so high that they were no longer, “Roger” or “Bud” or “Kevin” or “That guy who always snored.” You’d forget their names and they’d slowly become “brick” and “brick” and “brick” and “That one brick that dreamed with his nose and wouldn’t shut the fuck up about it.” The house is like that. Too much time, tragedy and transition between anyone else and the house to remember it was ever a place to live.

So, they built around it I guess. I can only imagine the story surrounding that. So much of the city has been torn down and built back up again. Monuments, apartment complexes, family homes, you name it; all of them have been caught in the crossfire of the free market and consumerism. How this place dodged those heat seeking missiles is beyond me. I can only imagine the husk of that place was so long cold and dead, they couldn’t quite hit it and moved on to the warm bodies nearby.

It’s a wonder I saw it myself! Any other day I wouldn’t have noticed it. If it had taken me even a second longer to make out what it was, I would have already moved on, back to the meeting at hand. But it just ‘clicked,’ after a few moments. Ted had said something, you know Ted? Well he had said something during our call that triggered this whole moment where my mind disengaged and went somewhere else. I think it was something like, “It’s not like you ever go anywhere interesting on the Ferris Wheel, it’s all elevation and the marvel of how tiny we are in conjunction with how well we’ve compensated,” and I got lost on that train of thought looking out the south window into the unkempt grounds below.

As I moved from train car to train car in my mind attempting to unpack what he had said while looking down at this puzzle of vegetation, it snapped in place. I could see it! The house! Like focusing your eyes for the first time in the morning. It went away for a second, but sure enough I was able to click it back into place again, much easier this time. It was there, struggling beneath the waves of overgrowth around it. Below the briars and other hardy plants that couldn’t give two shits about the sun. I had to focus on the meeting of course, but I couldn’t hardly look away either. Each time I did I had to take a moment to find it again.

End of the day, I’m down on the bottom floor looking for a way into the interior grounds. Did you know there isn’t any? The whole south wall is concrete for the first two stories. And before you ask, I checked, it’s the same for the other buildings. The whole area is inaccessible. No wonder it looks like a tree hell down there.

Now I can’t stop looking at it though. That house. Makes you think doesn’t it? It has got to be a whole new flavor of darkness in there.