LJIDW-LPF Week 2: "My Mount Rushmore"

I've never been particularly impressed by architecture.

Buildings should be functional. Clever features are clever features and of course they have their place, but to me, fancy stonework and so forth is largely a waste of time and effort.

One earthquake and either way, you're still looking at a pile of bricks.

But that's a house.

Even in a pile of bricks, you can have a home.

Even people who make significant contributions to a society, ones who get a building future pile of stones named after them, will all be forgotten after a while.

It's a hard fact, but the truth is that all of us will only ever be important to a few people. Even in our own families, our memories will likely be gone within three or four generations. Which is fine. If we have loved well in the time that we have, then we have lived well. A full home, even amongst a pile of bricks, is happy.

Hard not to have it, though.

Friends are great, we can feel satisfied with them for up to a few hours at a time. Religious/Spiritual practices can bring peace and joy amongst the darkest of times. But it still hurts to pull the duvet over our heads at night without a shoulder to rest that head on. It's still a fight to contain the jealousy when our (married, younger) sisters are heavily pregnant and getting full time care of their step-kids. Or to remember that it's not actually our baby to invest all of our hopes in. To not throw all of our neediness at someone on a first date, because we know from bitter experience that loneliness + loneliness =/= happiness, if there's nothing else to go with it, even when the loneliness is oh so very strong!

And it's hard. We try not to let it, but it drains us. We lose relationships when someone's life takes a turn into these family adventures and we're no longer in a similar stage of life. Or when we try to ask them to fill roles in our lives that overstep the boundaries that would otherwise be in place. Not completely, necessarily, but it's still not going through the journey of live together. We don't have other relationships building us up that they do. We try to stop it, but we become filled with misery. And then no one wants to see us anymore anyway. And the misery is weird, because it's like acid, so it dissolves and empties us. Nothing left. No heart, hardly, and not much personality either. No future without any hope, no legacy.

We're just an empty shell.

A stone house.

One earthquake away from crumbling.