The Destruction of a Building

 There's a building being destroyed across the street. From where I stand, I can see the dust rising, catching the wind, and floating west. I can see the mechanical claws of the excavator ripping apart the roof, sheet by sheet. I can hear the scraping of the claw and a rummaging of concrete, scrap metal, and wood as an impersonal beast creeps forward. Every so often, when the traffic is calm, I can hear the indistinct clamoring of indistinct workers in T-shirts and blue jeans.

The building buckles, cracks, and wails as the claw rips into its side. A wall turns to rubble as steel pipes are ripped out of the second floor. The building sits still, stoically. What's the building thinking of? What's a building supposed to be thinking of, as its face it torn from its body? In the last moments of its death, what would flash before an abandoned hotel's eyes?

The first answer is that it cannot see, it cannot remember, and it cannot think. Nothing would flash before its eyes. For us, we would perhaps recall our friends, family, and loved ones; but a hotel cannot even form relationships, not really. The relationship that a hotel has with its tenants is the same relationship that a whore has with their clients: it’s deeply intimate, yet necessarily transient. A hotel is not something to rely on. It’s not something that you can come home to every night and stay sane. No one can get married to their prostitute. No one can live in their hotel room.

Though, it’s not necessary to live in something to gain value from it. Perhaps, for someone, this was a refuge from an abusive husband, the place where a fearful mother took her kids for a night’s rest away from the punched-out walls of their home. Maybe it was an old homeless woman’s shady relief from the beaming demon of the Oklahoma sun. Maybe it was the last place a young gang member saw before he faced his death at the end of a gun barrel.  Maybe it was where a heroin addict took his last breaths before slowly injecting just a few milliliters too much euphoria into his wooden veins.

Maybe it was all of these things and more. Maybe it was none of these things. I can’t say. I never needed to stay there. For me, it will forever remain a Schrödinger’s cat. I never slept in its maybe roach infested, maybe comfortable beds. I never stepped on its maybe sticky, maybe well-kept floors. I never flushed its maybe dysfunctional, maybe clean toilets. This essay is a reflection on potential human experiences that I have never had, never wanted to have, and, now, cannot have.

We all lost a bit of our freedom today. We will never, ever be able to stay in that ghetto hotel on the corner of Cache and 12th street. I will never be able to write this article again for the first time, and you will never be able to read it for the first time.

It’s a simple consequence of time that, so long as we are mortal, we are slowly running out of truly unique experiences and slowly running out of time in which we can experience. We lose our freedom with every act of destruction, but also with every act: with every nap taken, every book read, every person spoken to, and every hour passed.

There’s not much left of the building now. The rubble is being placed into a storage container, presumably destined for some sort of industrial landfill, recycling center, or scrapyard: a graveyard and a nursery. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, after all. The building will live again. Eventually, schizophrenically, in some strange sort of reincarnation, the building will live again. Its roof melted into new sheets, its wood becoming fire, and its dust becoming soil. Its soul will live on in the same way. Eventually, sporadically, it will re-emerge in old advertisements, old stories, and old minds. Maybe it will flash before someone's eyes in their last moments.

A building has been destroyed across the street, and I hope it means more than the apathetic excavator would lead me to believe.