You can tell the difference between sincere civilization and that which has been abandoned by the variation in gravel and grass. Your feet on the weeds, your sandals not saving your skin from curious insects and irritated ants. You can move just a few inches to the left, and there you'll notice the difference quite clearly, even though nature has taken over, licking and winding its way back over human's horrid touch. There, just a foot over, you can see the white gravel amid the too green grass. Straining, not even that hard, though, you can discern the once road shoot straight ahead perfectly past the pine trees and cream-gray ruins to the ocean behind a long rusty fence.
The yard to your right - which likely once held some sort of sign designating the place, but only shows wild green now - exposes nothing new to your eyes. It's been taken back. Nature ate it all in just a few short decades and its leafy maw is aiming for the short, tight, little motel stretching directly diagonal to your position.
You turn slightly, facing the ruins, crossing your arms. What's there to see now? Not a bit of kudzu, it's too north, and the ocean weather snaps up the humidity that makes that invasive plant sweat happily. Nonetheless, there's vines everywhere, some sort of plant you don't the name of, but could identify by sight at this point. It's climbing and constricting like a python, cracking and crumbling the plain frame of the one story motel.
You approach without timidity, ignoring the bites on your feet and the few thorns dancing against your bare ankles and calves. Standing at the first room, you wait outside the door, unwilling to venture inside. Here, you look easily right, trying to envision what once happened here. The memory isn't yours to conjure, but the images flick up through your brain into your mind's eye as simple as it was yours to remember.
There's a black boy in blue trucks, shirtless, knocking on the door. His feet are sandy on the cement, and his skin glittering with droplets from the ocean. The room's sharply plain white door swings open, revealing no one to you, but everything to him. His grin is sheepish but magnificent, and a long arm reaches out and pulls him inside, after saying his name in amused scolding.
You follow the imaginary cement sidewalk to where you're standing, interposing the weeds and the soil on top of the white-gray stone that must been sinking below. You see again your sandals, ignore the dots of blood, and raise your gaze to the room before you, the first on the block of six, seven rooms the little motel offered.
There's no door to push open; it rotted away over the last few decades, was stolen, pushed aside, melted in a hurricane, you're not sure. But it is no longer there to even examine. Instead, the room is revealed in its utter simplicity, and you're left wondering dumbly where guests slept as you scan the small room. The door frame is barely a foot over your head - low, very low, like they didn't care about the build of the people who stayed there just about the dollar bills in their back pockets. The room seems much the same, like guests were not supposed to sleep there, but just use it to get to the ocean.
There, of course, is no cot left, not a hint of a bed, and you cannot even imagine where it would be. The room itself seems to be about ten feet by ten feet, though you've never been good with measurements. Now there's no floor you can really see, though the carpet peeks through, not a color anymore but a texture in contrast with the dirt and wildlife. A branch from a old tree hanging over the motel has dropped down through the nonexistent roof and is resting halfway through the tiny room, its branches spreading out like decomposing memories in the small space. Your eyes are drawn to the only two real things left in the room that cry humanity: the miniscule shower immediately to the left in the corner and the adjacent toilet still mildly white.
Your hands almost itch to strain out and run fingers over the tile of the shower. Small, square things, pale blue, robin's egg blue, sweet sky blue, not faded but evenly dusted with dirt, even up the wall. The tile builds up to the roof which no longer protects the room and extends down into a diamond with a inch tall ridge to contain the water that once lapped across the blue stone.
There - a series of people showering there - you can see them flit across time and space, ghostly apparitions of what once happened in this room. Summer after summer, winter after winter, spring after spring, fall after fall. While the green around you goes unchanging, you see it all: the shower pressure fluctuating from soft to hard, the water from hot to cold, the tile going through repairs, covered in sand, touched with blood, splattered with gunk and dirt and semen, slick with hard soap and expensive shampoo and grocery store conditioner and pale dye and painful bleach, different shades of hair, different lengths of hair, falling off from age and from disease and from stress and from natural change, clipped on purpose and cut from crazy.
There's different feet there - black feet, white feet, brown, red, and yellow, all different colors; so many bare, some in beach sandals, a few still in tennis shoes, even one in sexy strappy things; scars from running on asphalt and gravel and across fields and seashells, scars from abuse and from exercise and illness; bruises from work, bruises from falling, bruises from drug use; skinned knees, cuts lacing their way up calves and bordering fingers, open sores and closed scabs; toenails perfect, some painted, some manicured, some chipped, some dirty, some not even there just dirty open things from snapping them off at the beach by mistake.
Sliding up the apparitions wildly changing as you gaze up the blue tiles dusted with soft brown, tickled with vines choking the shower, you can see the thighs of the guests. So many black and white and all the shades humans come in; with dark pubic hair, with blonde, with red, with brown, with nothing there, with too much there. Your eyes moving, you can see the stomachs of those who stayed in the room - obese guts, beer guts, scars from pregnancy and surgery, thin things ribcages showing, strong abs and twisting hips. A white woman pressed against the tiled wall, a dark-eyed man touching her sides sloping to strong curves; a young athletic boy leaning down, pressing a sore kneecap with spidery fingers; an old man shuffling across those tile with tired World War I feet; a lady with wavy red hair, fingers threading through loose locks; a weak-souled fellow brushing the alcohol off his lips as the water strikes his shoulders.
You're leaning against the door frame, watching all this. You can see the clothing come on, and off, and on again; men and women and children walking across the small space, taking garments out of the drawers that were long ago stolen from the motel, lifting them off the bed, dragging them off the floor. White hands, black hands, brown hands, women's hands, men's hands, the hands of children drawing cloth across their skin, shifting and struggling to put bathing suits on, skirts on, shirts on, jeans on, khakis on, shorts on. Sandals sliding on, tennis shoes, black professional shoes, high heels, bare feet walking out the door, directly where you stand, through you, past you. You look over your shoulder at the jungle outside, and that's that. The apparitions fade from your imagination, and you're left with the angry insects and far-off ocean breathing back and forth and the sweet sigh of history surrounding you.
The branch fallen in the once-roof, the giant square width that leads to the sky, prevents you from going any further inside, but you've already seen it all it seems. All around you, the previous motel guests are walking and running to the beach, to work, to the store, to pay bills, to lovers and friends and rivals and people they want to kill but can't. They stayed here, where you stand, decades ago, and it's obvious under the green growth and decomposing marks of the motel if you have the awareness, and you do. You have it, and you feel almost no comfort with what you're left with.
The boy from before is leaving the room, rubbing his arm where his mother grabbed him. He's got a dollar in one hand, and he's heading towards the busy asphalt road across the yard in front of the motel. Cars from 2005 and 2009 dash by, clamoring for empty beaches in national parks and private stretches of land they've bought after years of labor, desiring McDonald's and $29.95 fresh seafood buffets and apple martinis and cold beer, wanting to twitter and email and bring up Facebook and check news sources online now now now. The boy makes it to the road, looks both ways, and crosses into the street. A U-Haul speeds just barely by him, and you watch soundlessly as his apparition vanishes as a brand new convertible flies by to a three story condo with its own jacuzzi on a dark balcony and a sexy marble stone shower.
You don't look back at the motel room and head to your car resting on the gravel. This place hasn't changed. You disregard nature eating the building, snapping chunks off, cracking huge wooden and grass teeth over the plaster and cement. The motel has not changed since when it was in its in zenith, its guests still seek its shelter. Your hand is on the car door, and you dare to glance back, wondering if you can really believe that.
You can see the sky blue tile through the jagged pieces of glass that was once a fine though tiny window to the motel room.
You can believe that, yes. It will never change. Nature can and will take it back entirely, but you... you know it will always be there, be the same.
