A Man in Need of Renovations

Like a bone stuck in the ground, destined to loom over its grave,
there stood the lighthouse, the deadest carnation to ever still stand.
In the middle of its petals, at the top of its stem, was its only hope for living essence left.
Not the older brazier coal fires they would once burn,
but an old unlit Argand lamp with 10 wicks,
each one with time, slowly snuffed by the darkness.
Entering through a once sealed flue, here the cold now creeps in and out,
until it learned crawling wasn’t necessary.
This was its new home, to enter freely through little unseen doors
of a cold, tall, neglected lightship,
destined to anchor forever whether forsaken or not,
on a dead little island.
Such an unsightly sight.

Its high walls were crusted in algae,
flaked with water-eroded paint peeling off of crumbling dried brick.
Every day the sun on its back, every night the waves sucking away the color, relentlessly,
water sucking away the life.
I think you would see if it could,
but a lighthouse simply isn’t able to cry.
It only can have slightly salt-tinged dew on its glass on sad mornings.

It’s strange seeing a forgotten monument for the first time,
not in pictures but in person.
There’s so much romanticism about such places from afar
because it satisfies this desire that many have
to see something that their mind recognizes as old, walking that bridge of the departing.
An identity in its decrepitness, aged from the life it has lived.
Maybe it’s the whispers of nostalgia in creaky floorboards
Or coffee stains like an open wound to someone else’s past.
To look at, to look through, a bruise upon their favorite tv chair.
Maybe it’s how you don’t have to think so deeply about the whys and hows
that you would if you were self-reflecting about your own life.
I can hear the distant echo of the dishwasher,
on a dim tv lit evening with me and my dog on the couch.
A dishwasher with dishes I don’t have to put away
and there isn’t a reason I’m drinking what I’m drinking.
It’s so comfortable.

But I fucking hate comfort.
In one of those pivotal moments of your life,
one boring March morning, there was a little picture of a dingy old lighthouse.
An ad of sorts as I read a magazine,
possibly the Chicago Tribune, or maybe the New York Times.
Honestly more than likely a local paper. But I know without a doubt
it was over a cup of hot chocolate and some sort of flour pastry
with fake sugary jelly in the middle.
And at that moment I fucking hated it:
The deliciousness,
the fork and knife in my soft tender hands,
the snow-white napkin upon my lap,
the waiter’s politeness,
the air-conditioned air,
the comfort of the restaurant,
the comforts of my life.
As I sat there staring back into the midst of my mind, my eyes must’ve glazed over,
because my waiter asked, “Is everything, alright sir?
Here are your eggs with thyme.”

At that moment I stood up with my newspaper, took out all the cash I had in my wallet,
and handed it to him, which was much more than the bill.
After which I walked away, never to see that man again.
He probably took my actions as being rude, even disrespectful,
but I hope he didn’t take it personally.
Because I needed out.
Of that restaurant, out of my town. Where I always circled the blocks,
worrying about what people passing by were thinking,
as the car smoke in the air entered all of our heads like I was in the midst
of some exhausted demon’s nest, where fumes trickled out of angry thing’s nostrils.
Evil things.
Petty people.

That day, I walked with no willpower left, disconcerted and disconnected,
from even the things I once enjoyed.
Like the fountain on Baker Street, all pretty and white.
I used to go there often with a penny or two, because of all the old wives’ tales, you know.
Or like the woman who ran the breakfast shop
and the conversations we used to have, a rare angel amongst us.
She always brought her dog to work,
her little living halo on the ground, circled and comfy,
always looking like a fawn.
She would raise her head from the floor when someone walked in;
for me, there’d always be a wag. That coupled with the ladies’ warm “on time as always!”
meant I didn’t need donuts to have a sweet morning.

It’s been weeks since the last time I visited.

I needed out.
And the great white beam in a meaningless black-and-white photo,
in some random magazine had an appeal that began to cement itself with me.
I kept glancing at it as I walked down the sidewalk along Hazelwood St.,
“Old Ardnamurchan Peninsula lighthouse…
Money to be invested for renovations…
In need of a caretaker…”
as it briefly bulleted the potential summer circumstances for someone
who chose to uptake the upkeep of a rundown lighthouse.

It started as teasing fantasies, during restless evenings looking out my window,
daydreaming through entire nights about tall white towers,
beacons of hope to guide me through my restlessness.
The night’s depths had slowly become hours in which I couldn’t escape.
There were so many things I could’ve tried to help me have slept,
maybe some would even have worked,
but I tried nothing.
I refused in defiance that didn’t make any sense.
Nothing made sense anymore.

One particularly pathetic night with a soda in my hand, I couldn’t even muster a sip
and started thinking about the things I went to, to become uplifted.
It made me not want to think.
So instead, I walked past my dusty treadmill, and out to my porch
to soak in the scorched red sky.
Eventually, my eyes sank toward my lidless trash can below me.
In it, a soggy and torn paper with a little red boxed advertisement in the bottom right corner. Right then and there I knew, how my summer was gonna go.
I threw my can in the bin and shut the door.

Fast forward through several more weeks of work,
through nights out with people to try and save face,
attempting to remember the birthdays of all the people I knew,
June 13th finally came, when I was to say goodbye to all of them.
The phone calls and hugs made me feel like I was asleep inside,
barely able to show it, but loving them at the very same time.
“You’ll be back before you know it,” Angela said, and I mustered an assuring look,
but it slipped as soon as I began to leave.
I started playing Helvetia’s Junk Shop as I began driving towards the perils of the sea.

Fast forward to a boat ride across the Atlantic Ocean.
A cargo ship that felt like it was full of nothing.
Days full of leaning on railings and staring at digital clocks,
listening to music, my headphones beneath raincoat hoods
like I was holding the music even closer than before.
It was the least foreign thing, in a journey full of foreigninitys.
Sometimes I realized how absurd it all was.
But it was because of me.
And that felt good.
Simultaneously in control of the things I couldn’t ever normally have been before
being on a sea of nothing

And after a little over a week, here I am,
on a pier so splintered I’m surprised it hasn’t sundered,
having just stepped off a boat that walked across an entire ocean.
I stand with a backpack, a mop, and a bucket,
before the ugliest of lighthouses

It’s strange seeing a forgotten monument for the first time,
not in pictures but in person.
It’s no longer an illustration, flat to your grazing fingers.
No longer flat to your mind since the cracks rose no issues of structural integrity,
nor did the image make you think about how you will be shitting
in a rickety outhouse for weeks upon weeks.
But what the picture doesn’t capture at all, in the slightest, is the true beauty.

The full breadth of a landscape that causes the death of dreams,
because who needs to dream when there is this?
A place without a single tree for miles,
only mousy and green grass, somehow learning to grow amongst stoic rock,
with an impenetrable grey that I couldn’t wait until I understood. If I ever could.
The plants felt brittle to the touch, weathered by forces to no avail, for they live!
They breathe with me from the freshest of sky.
Years of wind couldn’t kill them.
Years of crashing waves.
Years of isolation.
Yet we run,
because we are able.

This is a place that can dissolve humans,
weak fleshy humans.
Into nothing.
And it’s a strange feeling, when you think and feel, that you may be the end of a bloodline.
Because I’ve been here for mere moments, well, I suppose it’s already been a couple of hours,
(I haven’t even stepped inside the new place I will be living)
and I’m already thinking about what it would be like
to vanish up in this mist
on a quiet morning in Scotland.

In the distance, I could see little beach coves
of white sands and black mineral scabs,
which I couldn’t wait to sit on during lunchtime, to eat a sandwich,
and just be utterly fucking lonely.
However, this time, there would be a wave of peace to it.
Since I can think, in an empty environment of sparsely immense things.
That’s why I was here, to clear my mind
And the damn things that have been stopping me
from living.

I fucking hate comfort.
I fucking hate how much I love it.
And despite all of this beauty, I know what I got myself into.
Long days of bringing oil and wax up hundreds of stairs,
days of plastering and scrubbing walls upon walls, floors upon floors,
floors which will have moldy boards I will have to pry, remove, and nail in new ones.
Days of standing on tall ladders and having to reach as far as I can with my roller,
as I repaint the lighthouse’s exterior.
And after these long days, there will be no oven to conveniently cook dinner,
only temperamental campfires.
Would I be sleeping on some sort of hay? Most certainly not a viscoelastic foam mattress.
This is a place so primitive, there wasn’t even a rooster to let one know the sun was upon them.
Fitting to this, an old Irish man named Oisin is supposed to come out later today,
to give me the full ins and outs of what I was doing here.
Or more so what he wants to be done.
Because I knew my reasons.

Am I meant to want to bleed?
To sweat until the salt stung my eyes?
I can’t wait to be so exhausted sleep will put a bag over my head,
kidnapping me once again like it did after the long eventful days of my youth,
running the backyards in Georgia, when every field felt like Scotland,
and I didn’t need a lighthouse in the middle of nowhere
to relight my soul

I sat myself down on the steps before the house’s doorway,
this time without a single thought at all.
After a moment, I looked down at my hands to appreciate them,
one last time,
in their chastity.