Innocence

Welcome, to this monument to failure; to the death of hope. Purpose echoes, but that is all, unrealised amongst the walls peeling their paints and the windows with broken panes. Art still touches them, children's scrawls, on stained glass cracked or smashed, and doors not even on hinges, torn aside and left to rot amongst scraps of leaves and twisted nails.

Nature curls its way towards this place, tendrils forcing their way through the smallest of gaps, strangling away the abandon of man; covering the grey and the peel and the fade and the loss with green spread, reaching like fingers across the playground, stretching forward with their smothering hold.

My life was smothered in such a place, and the echo I can strain to almost hear is the resonance of my soul and the still-lasting, aching sadness by loss, with longing, for hope. There's a loneliness here that I feel as close beside me as the half-stolen fence in the abandoned yard. The ring of happiness and youth is lost to here, to me, and the quiet emptiness almost disruptive in its calm. So close. So apart. Cracks along the walls run like the cracks in my life, but their reassurance offered only with the faintest of thoughts; they head, upwards, don't they - towards the sky.

***

Visited an abandoned school while in Wales. The photos aren't the best, admittedly, but I wanted to combine them with the writing which I did while at the site and, apart from a few tweeks to sentance structure and removal of words used more than once, it's mostly unchanged from the raw text.