sMaShInG tHe WaLl

a week ago

i stood up in the middle of the night

with a nervous firestorm feeding deep inside me,

unquiet,

out of control,

and fretful.

anxious, but restrained,

a monsoon in a mason jar,

i had to vent properly.

so, i quickly decided to

remove the wall between my bedroom and my living room.

 

i grabbed the first thing i could find,

a golf putter,

and i smashed into that wall with a mad urgency.

i screamed with every impact,
and to anyone but my closest friends,
it would have seemed a psychotic episode
worthy of the finest restraints.

the wall turned to pie crust

and flakes of it
salted the floor
like stale bread crumbs.

the air filled with powder and ash,
which to my surprise
swirled into a thin cyclone by the force of the ceiling fan.

and when the putter snapped in two,
i ran across the room and grabbed the leg off my piano,

and smashed the wall with that.

powder was everywhere.
in my mouth, my nose, my eyes.
and beams of porch light began to appear in the fog
peering through the threads of the blinds.

after 10 minutes of mad smashing, i stopped.

and thought...

"this is a nice piano leg.
i don't want to mess this up too much. 

i should probably get a hammer."

the next morning i woke up...

worried.

and felt very grateful that i had not yet destroyed the studs
in what turned out to be the
most important load bearing wall in the house.

oddly enough, the place will look so much better without that wall,
and when it is finally fully removed,

it will open up the house to a breath of fresh autumn air.

sometimes you just have to get rid of it all,

destroy the house and powder the room,

to make it

bearable.