And I look out onto the empty campus courtyard. Nobody comes here anymore. The doors were shut and the caretaker, weeping, nailed them together, he tried to make them impossible to open. And he went out to his shed and he didn't come back out of his shed, except for a brief walk every morning. Across the empty playing field, and the empty graveyard, and all those empty paths made by children who are not children anymore.
I look up and around. The cobwebs try to grow, but I won't let them. The dust builds up, truly nothing can stop that, but I keep true to my pact of endless renual. Nobody passes by anymore, but if one were to they would be amazed at how carefully tended and trimmed the grass would be; how polished the masonry and the statues in the North gardens; how new it all would feel to an old heart. An old caretaker's heart.
I know in my hearth that one day the caretaker will return. And he will be so proud of me once again. One night, in those days when he still returned to his shed, he must have been sleeping peacefully there, a group of school children broke down one of the walls and they trampled on the gardens and they made rude gestures with the statues: laughing and spitting and disrupting things. Throwing cigarette butts into oblivion. Not caring where the debri landed.
Perhaps the caretaker lay awake that night, listening, desperately clutching the pillow around his head, submerging himself, doing everything he could to escape that noise. Maybe that was where his heart broke, or was it the next morning. When he came to the place those school children had been. I couldn't stop them. They overpowered me. The classroom windows of Room Y were shattered. The desks were mostly all overturned. Scattered on the walls was graffiti. Mindless slogans trailing off. Echoes of sex. Echoes of art. Static of teenage stupidity. Empty bottles and remnants of stomach juices pooling the floor. And the caretaker looking into the empty classroom. And the vigour left him. He went for his last walk then. I remember watching him leave on his trail. I continued to watch until night fell and the sun came back. I still continue to watch.
I keep my hallways clean. I have become stronger.
Some nights later those school children returned. They climbed in over the broken glass into that room. Room Y. I wasn't going to leave them off. They had broken the heart of the only person who had ever loved me, tended to me, actually noticed the house and not just my function. In a moment the windows which contained jagged glass and moonlight were walls. And then in the blackness disturbed by phone screen light, the children found they were in a room with no door. A room without exit. A box containing everything left of their lives. And then the screaming started.
It ended a moment later and the crying started. The confusion. Chaos. I gave them a door. A boy opened the door. It gave him a hallway. He began to walk down this hallway, his class mates running out with him. All but the one, who I slammed the door on before she could make it. Call me sadistic.
My walls began to shrink on her. And then there was no room anymore. Crushed into non-existence. Room Y. There is no Room Y in me anymore. I let it go. Like one trims one's fingernails when they become worn and dirty. And the rest of the children run down the corridor. And they keep running. It must be miles long, they think after some minutes. Then some hours. Then they reach the end: a door. They open it. It opens onto another hallway, identical to the first.
The courtyard is bright today. Some day my caretaker will return. And the children kept running and walking. And eventually all their batteries will run out. My exits were nailed shut long ago. He sealed my heart for him alone. My lover. My teacher. My only and last friend. He will come home one day. I will swallow him.
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