On Dying

3ww prompt: Earnest, Layer, Reactive

title: This Use To Be My Living Room, photo from On Dying Series by marisol diaz

I was born in the pandemonium of urban blood clots, but somehow I escaped. I've traveled much since then, through the arteries and veins of this rural heartland and I have to tell you that I've seen the decay. Sometimes its slow and benign, yet too often its malignant and devastating. Like the rings around a cut tree's trunk I can see the years of this state's life spiraling before me. And I am but an earnest microcosm of its day. I sit around your brittle, chafing, chipping brick and peel a layer of a earthy flesh back to see the ache. I wonder why all political repairs have been cosmetic when cosmetics are the most short-lived, insignificant aspects of living, to the blind.

"yeah" you say "but it's the seeing who are misled, who are ingenuinely reactive, who are truly blind."

I sit and contemplate your words. All I know is the saddest thing about all those homes dying and business's closing are that new hearts, dreams and passions are not moving in their place, instead those structures are sitting there, rotting, leaving the land marred with memories that like stains are impenetrably residual.