By Olivia Burdash
I dare not approach ruins. Ashes and dust, wither and rot.
But all of us fall to the forces of curiosity.
I don’t belong in ruins. I intrude in a palace that has long forsaken the breath of life. My exhales echo into emptiness and my footsteps shake worn cobblestones. Lost in the darkness, I feel the eyes of the past watching me, judging me, and encouraging me to question why the place is forgotten. The easier option to ponder is that it was abandoned, simply left behind to fend for itself in elements that do not care what lives or dies. The more fearsome option is that something forced the living out of the ruins—something that lurks in the shadows, eagerly waiting to punish me for repeating the crime of living.
It is better not to know. When a place is shrouded in mystery, knowledge seems forbidden.
I wonder how to breathe life into ruins, reversing the clock and giving opportunities for it to rebuild and thrive. I wonder what it would be like to dance under a sparkling chandelier, a beautiful dress swishing around my legs. I let myself become part of the castle—of what it used to be.
But I am here. I am now. The place is not mine, and it does not claim me. Perhaps we are both prisoners to time, but only one of us can endure centuries of neglect and forgetting. The ruins are a paradox of enduring and fading away. The towers live on, but they aren’t the same as they were before.
What lives in the shattered stained glass crafts a mosaic of time. And, if I look too hard, I could swear I see your eyes shining back at me for only a moment, quickly fading back into obscurity, leaving me alone with the breeze snaking through cracked windows. My footsteps continue to creak, but I did not think they would be that loud, and I am reminded, once again, that this place is not for the living. We are the ones that get closer to fading when in close proximity to death. We choose to let ourselves fade away when tempted by the ghosts of the past. Here, I am closest to you and furthest from you, and it leaves me frozen in time.
But the stained glass, ancient and broken, contains beauty and familiarity, of the sun and the moon in faded colors. And, for a moment, I exist in memories, and I see ghosts waltz in ruins, looking up at the dark night sky, for our moon is one and the same.
