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The Old House

Do you remember the old house?

A couple blocks down.  Abandoned, and left in the care of the state.  
We used to find our way in on warm summer nights.  Midnight and armed only with a flashlight and a camera, convinced we'd find something to scream about.  Something better than all the horror films we spent our Friday nights watching, together in your room.  
We'd push our way past the kitchen door, sealed shut with time and the burnt out fumes of a fire long since extinguished, prepared to find the worst.  Or at least hoping to.  
Like we were the horror film we so badly wanted to be scared by.

We passed it last night, on your way to take me home.
Still the same after all these years, beautiful in its old age and somehow made more so by the burnt edges we hadn't seemed to notice the last time.  
Now though, it's somehow much more terrifying - more of a place to be avoided than the adventure we once imagined it to be.

And we reminisced; all the fragmented memories we managed to piece together into one whole of our jointed youth spent walking every twist and turn of our neighborhood, memorizing the number of steps we had to take to our favorite trail.  
We reminded each other of the overturned bathtub in what used to be a bedroom, and the molded stairs we followed into the basement, where we swore we'd find proof of a ghost.  We joked about the tired bats in the attic that simply stared at as us we made our entry, as though we were a guest long since over-due to a dinner party that had ended hours ago.    
And we were shocked at the things we used to do.  At how terrified we both now are by the sight of that house we once spent our weekend nights in, that we now both now we'll never see the inside of again.  

I guess it's just one more part of our youth that we walked away from without ever realizing we were waving goodbye.

<3