The Cabin

It had been twenty-four years since she’d last seen it, but the place looked exactly the same. As same as it can be since the night she left. 

The cabin is small, beautiful in aesthetic, and perfect but looks destroyed beyond compare. It looks like it’s been set on fire for a few hours before someone had eventually put it out but the damage had been done… that’s because it is. It wasn’t always like that. She doesn’t remember it being always like that. It used to be clean and whole, strong and sturdy. 

Even looking at it from afar, it doesn’t look safe. But she still goes anyway.

The creaking of the wooden porch hadn’t always been there, she wobbles a little as she steps unto it. She feels a little uneasy standing on the unstable porch but feels unsafe even more if she were to hold unto the rotting wooden post that looks like a slight breeze of wind will topple it, bringing along with it the entire cabin. With careful steps and quiet creaks, she approaches the broken door and pushes slightly, cringing as the door broke off from its rusting hinges and falling with a loud ‘bang’ that echoed throughout the area. Millions of dust flew through the air, and she had to wave it off with a hand to keep it from going to her eyes, making them red and swollen at the end of it. She coughs a little when some dust goes straight to her lungs and sneezes when it flies to her nose. She composes herself after that.

She goes, stopping only to take in the room as the entrance standing on top of what was the door. It’s dark, she observes. The only source of light was the natural sun that peeked through the many cracks of the only two windows of the cabin, both from opposite ends of the room. It’s dark, but she’ll take the sunlight for now. Shame on her for not bringing along with her another source of light. 

She enters, the wooden floor creaks once more but by now, she doesn’t care if it falls apart. She’s only interested in the room. She walks to the center, where the light is the strongest and the plank is the weakest. There, she spins slowly, her eyes taking in the various pieces of furniture destroyed and rotting. A drawer on the left side with broken glass lamps placed on top of it and gathering dust on top of dust on top of dust like it’s snow on a driveway on a winter night. If she were to run a finger on it, she would not be able to see skin underneath that dirt. 

There’s picture frames hung on the wall, but the actual pictures have been burned and reduced to ashes and the frames are crooked and hanging onto the edge of the nail. A single swing would knock it off. There’s a broken table next to that drawer, broken in half and its chair strewn over different places in the room, broken as well. There’s a stove, but it’s melted and bursted from the heat, she can see a single pan and kettle but the metal is melted. 

In the far left end of the room, is a couch… a couch that perfectly fits two people and nothing more. It looks scorched but the fact that it’s still intact amazes her. 

By the state of it, she doesn’t even want to be near it, it looks rotten and infested with roaches that her face cringes at the sight of them entering and exiting from the holes that litter the furniture. The rug underneath it doesn’t look better as well, it looks like it’s been ravished by moths or maggots, she can’t decide which one. 

In the opposite direction of that, is a bed that is big enough for two people and still has enough room to move around. If the couch and the rug is bad, the bed is by far the worst she’s seen. Ants, roaches, and she’s pretty sure she sees mice underneath run from who-knows-where. It’s scorched, just like everything in the cabin, and on the brink of being reduced to little bits of cotton and fabric. The blue blanket doesn’t even look like a blanket anymore, in fact it doesn’t even look like it was blue in the first place. The two comfy pillows look like concrete to the naked eye and, if she were to place her head in it, it would be swarmed with roaches and bed bugs of various sizes. It’s infested and disgusting. 

The whole cabin looks infested and disgusting. After this, she decides, she’s going to take an hour-long bath. Many would have told her that she shouldn’t have come here and would question her motives for coming. 

“It’s been over twenty-four years, why are you still not over it?” She can imagine them saying. “I thought you were over it.”

She’d have to explain why she came here, but then they would question her explanation--and then she’d have to explain her explanation, and they would question that too. Until she eventually shows them why she came, but then they’d need a background story for that too. There will be no pleasing them, she knows and she expects. 

Truthfully, she doesn’t know why she’s here either. She doesn’t know why she went through a lot of trouble just to stand in the center of the room of a slowly falling apart cabin. If she’s being honest, there’s no major reason, really. She wants to have one, but she can’t think of one.

Closure? No, she had that years ago. She can’t think of anything else other than that, can’t think of any other reason that would elicit such action out of her. 

Or maybe it’s because the cabin is just another reminder to her that, for the first few years of her life, it had all been a lie. That for the first few years of her life, the number one person who she expected to be honest with her all the time had done nothing but lie and deceive her. Or maybe it’s because the cabin is where she spent the first few years of her life in blissful happiness until it was taken away from her in a single night, until it all came crashing down in a span of one night.

Maybe. Or maybe, she’s hoping for something else other than ‘everything is a lie’ and that there’s a deeper meaning to these wooden four walls. That there’s a deeper meaning to the lies fed to her while inside these four walls, that there’s a deeper meaning to the love given to her. 

Or maybe she hasn’t achieved the closure she needed as she led herself to believe she had all those years ago. 

She smiles, guess she found a reason after all. 

She turns to leave, careful in her steps once more so as to not disturb the cabin that’s hours away from collapsing in on itself as much as she already disturbed it. When she steps down from the porch and into solid ground, she looks over her shoulder to look at the cabin once more. 

This is the last time, she thinks to herself and that was all that mattered.