Arrival

I can no longer write the long, loveless novels that served as my being. Their analog hallways and sunlit rooms now sit mostly quiet, an empty woodwork of hull and dust where I once stored my voice. I can drop an echo of laughter, but it no longer reverberates in the space so empty, the hold once so laden and content. Full to the scuppers, Captain! the orphan had declared, and celebrated lion's hearts and grizzled wisdom and all the treasures hard won with retching and blood from betraying claws. Now the halls hold no ghosts of ghosts but declare unknown victory, not sharp, not soft, but wooden to the step if I walk through them. Halls long and empty, carved by the unstoppable tides of the heart, and rooms bright with sun, hallowed by my hand. And the resident soul one day woke up, packed nothing, and disappeared.
It must have begun there- when it woke up. Looking upon its home as if it had overslept, wandering the sun-tinted outside, it returned and wrote this poem on the dew of the window:
A fit to see the sun was shining
A fit to climb the hill
To look and see the beams alighting
On things that never will
Then it was gone. Wild-eye adventure, breathless countdowns, endgames, intrigues, and love, all rendered to a simple and final stop. The laden hull, the contented belly of fictitious life- I wonder what happened to it then? Dreamlike and confused, I am unable to piece together the final moments of the memory. Had I hesitated? Not that I recall. Have I forgotten some epiphany, though I recall coming to none? No. One day I was in a home of words, the next day I was not. No fanfare, incredibly, had occurred at the separation of myself and my life.
Visitation hours began nine am and ended at five pm on very select days- that is, the days I chose to visit. How cheap that felt- this restriction, these rules. I went sparingly. Three times, at most. And from the first, emptiness greeted me there. Dust had not yet created the film- my new eyes- which I now view it through. I saw nothing until the dust. The dust, the film, are everything. Confusing and mottled now, isn't it? The tides that built the halls have not refreshed, and they have not built anew. My hands are rarely idle, though no room do they forge for the sun to flood. Dust. Flood. Empty rooms of intemperate sun.
Why can I not see it again? Build again? Mind you, it only offends me that the power seems to be gone. That the novels which built my home are gone, I feel no actual regret.

I can no longer write the long, loveless novels that served as my being. Wild-eye adventure, breathless countdowns, endgames, intrigues, and love, all rendered to a simple and final stop. I one day woke up, packed nothing, and left it. The home that had taken me in when I had been abandoned, I abandoned. Had I? I trace my finger on a dewless window:
In fit I wrote the sun as shining
Content to build a lie
And lost the story I'd die to live
To find that I've arrived