A prose piece that explores the connection between physics and what we consider to be home.
I once read that the entropy of an isolated system
always
increases.
Entropy: lack of order or predictability; gradual
decline into
disorder.
It’s easier for me to reason in terms such as these.
I think of thermodynamics as I drive
by a building being demolished.
It is unfinished
Open and falling in on itself
The bones breathing air
for the first time in years.
It makes me think of home.
I drag my fingertips over
The memories and rub dust between them.
Thinking of those four walls that
We build to keep things out,
Yet how they
keep things in.
Home becomes an isolated system
vulnerable to those facts, laws, certainties.
How the physicality of “home”
The fleshly body of a house
Decays.
Energy can be neither created nor destroyed;
Another law.
I repeat it to myself,
Let it wrap around me like a heavy blanket.
We can demolish and damage
Rip apart buildings by their teeth
We can tend toward disorder
And oh how we did
but I cannot create
exactly what we had
again
I also cannot destroy it.
I drove by that building again last week
Or where it once stood.
In its place
A sign:
New construction to begin soon.
I take a different route home.