Description

It looks like a ship. It looks like a ship, and if the weather is right and you've had too many cigarettes and not enough sleep, it feels like a ship, the porthole lighting and the stories like decks, and the wrap-around porches and the metal railings. Leaning against that railing on the highest floor, with the sky above, and the concrete dizzying below, you have the feeling of flight, of flying, or the possibility of flying, or the possibility of greatness. There's a seediness, too- the green kudzu overgrowth, a trailer in the background. Cigarette butts, hastily smoked and hastily discarded, burning down slow and steady on the cement leaving cylinders of ash, ready to be blown away by any passing movement.

It's a place like any place, but the romance of youth and the veil of remembering make it mythical, inhabited in equal portion by heroes and demons. Rusty and divine, hallowed and left to rot, a ship, a soft place to land, a tower of learning, a proving ground, an arena where Christians met lions and lions met lions, and lions laid down with lambs and the elephants were brought down by a flea and then they all laid down together.