Cathedral of lost hope

Did you hear about those cathedral ruins in Mexico that suddenly re-appeared when the water level in a lake severely dropped due to drought? You didn’t, of course you didn’t. You had been long gone by then. But this attic is like that cathedral for me. Every time I come up here, it rises up with ghosts of you, circling around me like a pack of hungry wolves, instilling terror in my bones so I can’t move, frozen in this spot of the past.

The photos of the cathedral show two arched windows and the top part of the vaulted entrance and it looks, truly it does, like an alarmed face. Munch’s The scream. Helpless mouths gulping down the ubiquitous water, voiceless. I remember that feeling of quiet dread, of hope getting stuck in my throat, wedged on my silent vocal chords. What comes first: the silence or the fear? Premonition or threat? Comprehension or the dying of hope?

Bartolomé de las Casas was the name of the friar who built that cathedral. Casas means homes. Like this home that you gave me only to take it away. This home that is merely a house now and that I let fall to pieces because this is my only revenge. What pains me is not that I had gotten strong enough to oppose you too late, but that I am not strong at all. This is no victory, just self-pity. I crumble and decay along with it.