It has been likened to hell. Closer to the other side of the moon, perhaps, with its colorless craters and cracks. They were all turned to rubble dust. Dyed grey and capable of slipping through the fingers— the lost faces around a dining room table, the sobs seen only by bathroom mirrors. A dresser with love letters folded under the pajama pants and a floor where a terrier waited for the house to be full again on Friday afternoons. Gone. Gone. No, it couldn’t be hell. Not when there were traces of heaven in the ashes— of her unwashed paintbrushes and the cigars that he’d never stop smoking. Pieces of lost selves, of past selves, and dream selves… until even in its most unholy ugliness the place became holy, and we walked upon it with all the tenderness of a grave. It is said that war is innate to human nature. That Chimpanzees in Tanzania go to war and leave their dead washed over in river bottoms. Then the war was a natural distaster of sorts, wasn’t it? When our houses were cut at their seams, and men cradled dead babies in the streets. Greed is human nature too, some would add, as it shoved us reeling away from our ghosts. Out of earshot of his son’s voice on a park swing, of my love’s voice as he talked in his sleep (He always talked in his sleep. I could never remember the words after). It had been rumored that we would be allowed back. We were, when the children that had been born there should have been grown. When the streets were strangers with new names and patterns to them. It was some time before we stumbled on the old crypts of our old lives— found them upended by grave robbers who had turned the ashes of grandmothers and graduation gowns to gold dust, and claimed them as their own. And as I lay in bed I think of new beginnings to the story that has this end. Of changes that might have been made while it was being written. And I wonder if you ever recover from the disaster of being born human in a world that values you more as rubble.