My walk of choice is a paved path that takes me underneath the roaring highway and into another town. It weaves through farmer’s field after farmer’s field, wraps around a golf course, and continues for kilometers farther than my partially-broken body could ever walk. Eventually it leads down to the river, which is by far the nicest part of the walk, but that stretch is currently closed for construction— a true heartbreak.
Everyone is telling me I need to get outside and move my body more (by everyone, I mean my therapist and a dear friend. So. Everyone) and I really am trying to. Moving the stress and anxiety and grief and everything else out of my body rather than letting it stew and rot while I do the same on my couch is not my instinct, not the way my brain is wired. But I am trying to walk more, to stomp the shit out of my brain. Loving the path I walk certainly makes it easier.
There are bank swallows and yellow warblers and sparrows galore, and on this particular day, mushrooms like I couldn’t believe. The afternoon turned into a mushroom hunt, finding new ones every few steps, none of them like the last. My favourite ones were these purple shelf mushrooms growing on a stump. I was in awe, ABSOLUTE awe. I’d never seen anything like them! Thus began the mushroom hunt. I kept my eyes pointed to the grass on the right hand side of the path, crouching down at every new fungi I encountered. I recently saw someone say that they take “weird walks”, where their only goal for the walk is to find something weird, whatever that may mean to them. It kind of felt like I was on one of those, but maybe an “excitement walk”. Goodbye anxiety, goodbye grief, hello mushrooms.
Since the path is such a long and sweeping path, I do have to turn around at some point. I’ve been walking and biking this path for a few years now, and I always know my walk is reaching its end when I encounter the asbestos house. The asbestos house is an abandoned house on the corner of the path, right before a hill that takes you down to the river. This is always where I turn around, because if I go down that hill, I won’t be able to make it back up, and there is quite literally no other way to get home.
I love the asbestos house, for no reason other than the graffiti. The house has been sitting abandoned for ages, and of course, people love exploring abandoned houses. So in order to deter people from hopping the fence and breaking in, someone has spray-painted the outside of the house with the statement “GOOGLE ASBESTOS”. I appreciate their desire to educate.
I’m coming up to the end of my excitement/mushroom walk, rounding the corner to where there is a bench in front of the fence around my dear asbestos house, when it hits me that something doesn’t look quite right. And then I realize.
The asbestos house is gone.
Should this surprise me? No. The house has been standing abandoned for so long, and the city is actively trying to make this path more enticing for people to use. So it makes sense that the house would eventually not be there. But does coming across this completely knock me on my ass?
Yes.
I sat on my little bench, and stared at the empty lot, and I cried. This constant, this symbol of completion, this thing that made me smile every time I saw it, was gone. I texted my dad “the asbestos house is gone???” to which he responded “the what,” and I was once again reminded just how small and inconsequential this thing was, this thing that was causing me to cry, that was causing my brain to spiral, this thing that mattered to no one else. Hell, it was literally an ABANDONED HOUSE. In the grand scheme of things, it does not matter.
And yet, here I was, crying over the asbestos house.
But it makes sense, doesn’t it. It’s something I didn’t get to say goodbye to. It’s something I expected to be there in the morning, and then suddenly, wasn’t. It’s a constant that cannot be a constant anymore. And so now the purple mushrooms don’t seem so exciting, the blue sky doesn’t look so bright, the grief doesn’t feel so quiet. It’s just another moment where I am crying over something stupid because what I’m really crying about is the fact that my best friend is gone, and that there is nothing I can do to change that.
Eventually I get up and I turn around. I write a note in my notes app that says “I cried because the asbestos house was torn down,” as if I’m somehow going to forget this fact in the next 30 minutes. I make my way back around the golf course, down one hill and up another, under the highway and back to where I’ve parked the Jeep. I don’t stop to look for any other mushrooms. I turn the volume up on my headphones and I don’t pause the music to listen to birdsong. I see a dead snake in the grass, look at it for approximately 5 seconds, and speed up.
It sneaks up on me like this, when I don’t expect to be hit by my grief. When I’m listening to a song I love, but then I remember that we heard it for the first time together, and that we don’t get to dance to it together anymore. When I’m laughing with a friend I love and I suddenly realize that they never got to know her. When I’m flipping through my journal and I find a note she wrote me. When I’m expecting to see the damn asbestos house and it isn’t there, and now I’m wondering if I ever told her about it, if I ever showed her the GOOGLE ASBESTOS graffiti and if it made her laugh, and now its gone and did I ever even tell her about this fucking house?
And maybe the point is that although it is gone, I knew that it was there, and it meant something to me, and that isn’t nothing. Our time on earth coexisted and our lives got to intersect, and the spot where it once was is still the spot where I’ll turn around. I guess the point is that I’ll always know it was there, and I’ll always think of it when I reach that spot, no matter what goes up in its place. That the importance of it in my life doesn’t go away or diminish because I can’t see it, or sit with it, or talk to it, or show it to people. But God, it fucking sucks that it is gone.
You can decide if I’m still talking about the house or not.
Sprouting 