• empireOfLove@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    Sure, a few of them.

    One of the warehouses my employer owns is effectively abandoned- it’s basically cold machine storage for shit that hasn’t been used for 50 years. I had to go in there for a couple weeks as part of my job and it’s sure weird, all these massive millwork machines towering over you in the shadows deathly quiet. Once in a while you unexpectedly scare off birds or rats or one time a homeless dude. After a week it was pretty normal though.

    A few miles outside of the town I live in there’s an abandoned homestead. Only just found it this summer actually. It’s still mostly standing but all the windows are blown out and most of someone’s possessions are still inside. An antique truck is parked outside in various states of disassembly, there’s a chicken coop, an outhouse, and a well. Now that one is incredibly somber. This place was someones hopes and dreams, they loved and lost and toiled endlessly in that house and over that plot of land for thousands of hours, only to be ripped away from it by some unknown event- maybe economics, maybe a sickness, maybe their own death. Now it only sits decaying, the floors subsiding into the dirt, the walls beginning to bow and break, all these bits of wood stuck together into something that meant the world to some pour soul long since gone from this earth. Nature and physics returns to claim humanity’s folly, and all those hopes and dreams of that unknown person are forever lost to time, an ethereal thought lasting not even a picosecond in the cosmic scale of time.

    I spent a lot of time wandering around that old homestead. Probably wasn’t safe to go inside but it was still pretty humbling to see how little everything matters in the end. Dust to dust and all.