Several days before my father went into the hospital and never walked out, I wrote a single word down in a notebook in all caps as I was working on a home decor article.
“RUINPORN”
The piece was on beautiful abandoned homes intended to inspire your interior design. Mostly the images I found to accompany the piece were filled with delightfully chipping paint, lowly decaying wood, paneless windows, and beautiful light, sometimes filtering in through ceilings that no longer existed. Shrubs and vines encroached through windows and wound around stair banisters. They were the kind of places you imagined were inhabited by ghosts that shook the broken chandeliers and rattled the doors barely on the hinges. Sometimes there were relics–an old book on a shelf. A dingy bathrobe hanging in the closet. The spaces were far more vast than any house I’ve ever lived in, but appealed to me for their open and dilapidated spaces. Their vacancy and beauty.
The small house my father left behind was filled with so much. Broken furniture. Half-eaten bags of chips in the pantry. Over a couple of months, we emptied out as much as we could. I spent the Saturday after Thanksgiving, a few weeks later, cleaning out his office, which had always been stuffed to the gills after my sister moved out. It was a space my mother routinely pretended did not exist behind the closed door, filled with large dressers and desks, all full and littered with random things like old clock radios and Cubs hats. The room, as I found it that fall, was filled with scads of paperwork and bills. With books and magazines he’d likely never read. An entire drawer full of remotes from devices he no longer owned. Small notebooks filled with tallies of golf scores, grocery spending, and horse racing stats in his messy, mostly unreadable, handwriting.
The house, itself, perched on land once owned by my grandmother, was not exactly as grand as the abandoned spaces in my article photos. An 80’s ranch whose details told its age after 40 years of a family living very much within it. Hollow core doors were broken and warped. The carpet, while it had been replaced at least a couple times, was stained. There was a spot in the floor near the front door that was soft from bad sealing under it.. The years had been hard on her, as had we. The doors I’d broken slamming them in teenage rage. The hole me and my sister put through the living room still visible despite patching. The door jambs scratched with more than a dozen cats who had lived and died there. The kitchen drawers, mostly busted and barely opening for over a decade.
*
Five years before, I had lost my mother, not as suddenly as my dad, and after a rough year. But still somehow just as much a shock.. A year later, I finished a book about our relationship called feed, dealing with the complexity of growing up in an environment that fraught relationship between a mother and daughter, both my own and through things like fairy tales and myths. Strangely, for my father, there didn’t seem to be a book on the horizon. That particular relationship being much less wrought with artmaking material. Or at least I thought at the time.
What emerged instead were poems that were modeled on decor writing headlines about haunted houses. About how we leave the ghosts of ourselves behind in the spaces we inhabit.
While I could not have told you at the time what I was writing them for or towards, later it became clear that that particular loss had its fingers all over them. I was already calling it ruinporn long before I compiled the manuscript.
Having been a person who has lived in remarkably few houses compared to others my age, I always found myself weirdly attached to them. They crop up in poems occasionally and often in dreams. My grandmothers’ little red house. The trailer I spent the first four years of my life in with its wood paneling and green shag carpets. The small house in town we lived in before the last with the enormous oil drum behind the garage and the backyard where I’d spend entire afternoons on the swings with my headphones. The tiny Lincoln Park studio I lived in through grad school with its bathroom only accessible through the closet. The gorgeous Rockford apartment with the sleeping porch and farmhouse sink I had to leave when I didn;t find a job swiftly enough to pay for it the summer after. Even the cinder block dorn room I inhabited for a semester in North Carolina. They strangely feel tethered, even after all this time. To my own history. . Sometimes, I think, to my body. Even this apartment, which I have lived in for more than two decades, moving about its rooms. Where I’ve written countless poems, made art, made love, made a mess. Me and my fiance occasionally talk of getting a bigger place with an office for both of us. With a bigger kitchen for him and an outdoor space for both of us. But I dont know if we will or can just yet. Or even if I want to.
*
At the time I lost my father, I was just finishing up the first year after leaving my full time job in a library to write freelance work and devote more time to the shop and press I ran on the side. It was a year of change. Of fear. Of relief as I cobbled together numerous gigs and got my footing.. That November’s losses, however, knocked the wind out of me. Parentless for the first time, I was adrift and vulnerable to all sorts of nasties. Untethered was the only word that seemed apt in those months afterward for how I was feeling.
Being the person I am, I dove into work, into the holidays that were now unrecognizable to me. I barely remember the months after the new year, but I was writing a good bulk of the poems from RUINPORN. They are filled with advice for living in a haunted house, even when you yourself are in the haunted house. Fittingly, that fall before I had bought a fun Halloween sign on Amazon that said “She Herself is a Haunted House.” . I felt that very much that dark season as we cobbled new routines and new traditions from the broken pieces of the old.
In the past two years, I’ve watched other people my age begin to go through many of the same things. Ailing parents, frantic rushes to hospitals, calls that rattle the middle of the night. Actually sometimes much worse than my own. I suppose parental loss is something which afflicts everyone if you live long enough. Some younger, some older, but by the time you reach your 40s or 50s, that clock is ticking. Before each loss happened I imagined I would never be able to survive it. And yet, I did.
ruinporn feels like a reckoning of sorts. A book I would not have imagined writing even a decade ago. A grappling with grief and writing. With loss and that adrift sensation that makes your bones shake sometimes. Not all the poems are about houses and ghosts, but other are about destruction and rebuilding in a post-pandemic world.
As for my father’s house, the bank wound up owing more than any of us could pay, and since neither of us wanted it, back to the bank it went. The last few times I was there, I was convinced it was haunted, not by ghosts or the supernatural, but by memory and grief. And it's strange to think all houses, or at least most houses, are haunted in the same way. The places we build lives in that eventually crumble under our feet like sugar when shaken.
