It's quite simple. It's never been so simple. And you can't tell me it's just because I'm the one who came back.
The entire world stretched out in sepia like The Wizard of Oz in reverse and we overlaid it with color-coded maps of waters and deaths, shrinking from clarity.
It doesn't take a genius. A tree fell on the roof of the house where the wise man lived who put his heirlooms in the attic to save them from flooding. Barges crashed into perfect levees where no corrupt men took shortcuts. A fragile old woman in flip-flops climbs a rubble pile three times as tall as she is to find a hand painted cabinet covered in black mold and declare, "But it's so beautiful".
Is mold the enemy or the ally of the gutter? Both return sheet rock to the piles of dust it was made of, leaving the house naked. The mold calls forth the gutter who ekes the laundered house into existance. The moldy drywall ends in the same pile with the dust mask. You can hide in that rubble mountain until FEMA comes, but not in the wall-less bathroom.
We have seen the dark side of the moon and lived there. We have looked on the bent heads of billboards and seen the nothing they hid behind them. We have watched the wind toss about miniblinds in cubicles that never before saw the light of day in skyscrapers turned jack-o-lanterns by broken windows. What bogeymen are left to us? "The Big One" came and left us and we lived.
Our hearts sliced in half have cleaved like slugs to the first thing they hit, the one and only thing left standing, human, sweaty, divine, and we have found it good and unsullied. Lizards leave behind their eggshells in the sodden insulation, discarding disguises for skin. Overlays are not needed where flowers of every color spring up from bacteria-ridden sepia soil.
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