Four walls
Painted black to hide the stains.
The room’s history:
What happened and what remains.

At it’s best it was a white room,
Clean and neat.
A quiet place for all of your thoughts,
A room filled with ideas,
A room that hid all fears.

But that did not last long,
For you can see,
This room lost sight of its original purpose.

The fears hidden in the closet emerged
And now not even one’s soul was safe
Because before your very eyes
This pretty little room, clean and neat
Started to become less and less.

Less like the way it started its journey
Heading down a deep, dark miserable path
Closer to the idea of light but truly
A Demise.

A demise that is all at once terrible, poetic, and soothing.
Something that could be discussed,
But never is.

The room belonged to a young woman who was soon to become disturbed.

She was blossoming and could have had a bright future.
She was different, under appreciated,
And no one wanted her around.
They said she was a waste of space.
“A waste of space?” she would say.
And as the clockwork in her head began ticking,
An ingenious plan began brewing.

The only problem is, there was no plan.

In her head she was painting a gorgeous,
Cunning tapestry of woe in which those who deserved an unhappy ending
Would get one.
But she was simply cutting herself off from the world.

She spent the majority of her time in this room,
And with that she was becoming more alone,
And with that,
Forgotten.

The room began to collect dust.
Everyday another page would be ripped off of the calendar
And laid to rest.

Eventually a layer of pages dressed the floor.
Dust collected on the walls.
Cracks formed on the ceiling.

Days passed as usual
But to her
Time ceased to exist.

She went outdoors less often than before.
All trips out of the house resulted in stocking up
On foods that do not expire
And notebooks bought in bulk.

She spent her mornings taking pills purchased by men who spend their days in dark leery alleys.
She spent her nights filling her notebooks with everything that came to mind,
And after time has been lost yet again,
This girl who was once so pretty and innocent
Would slit her wrists and paint the walls red.

Letters crowded in the mailbox,
E-mails were left unread,
And in the garbage, a dead cellphone with no hope of being charged again.
Water and electricity bills went unpaid
And it was from then on her body could take no more.

Months went by and neighbors never saw her again,
They all assumed she had moved away.
One neighbor was apprehensive and too nosey for her own good,
That one neighbor called the police.

Investigations began and all seemed normal
Until they drew close to the basement steps.
A pungent odor oozed out from behind the door
And a lock did not stand in the policemen’s way.

Down came the door with the loudest of thuds.
The men crept down the stairs with the utmost of care
Not wanting to disturb whatever might lay in the darkness below.

The flashlights flickered on
And the stairs creaked deafeningly,
Stirring fear deep inside the men

They reached the bottom of the stairs
After what felt like hours
To find something so putrid
It would be forever burned in their memory.

In the far right corner of the room lay a slumped-over corpse
Surrounded by notebooks.
It was obvious to the men that the person was long dead
And when the lights illuminated the face
It was apparent that it was immensely decayed.
The closer they got, the more it felt like the stench was smacking them.
One officer was so mortified that he could not help but to bend over, clutch his stomach,
And drown his shoes in *****.

The was face distorted
In so many places
With colors that do not naturally occur on one’s face.
By the placement of the ****** features,
It almost seems as if it died laughing.

Laughing at the hilarity of what happened
That got it to that place.
Laughing at how the end came to be
And how much of a waste its whole life was.

The police left in a hurry,
Eager to get out,
To call in the cleaners
To erase what they have seen
So no one else would carry the burden associated with the sight.

The sad little house had everything in it removed and burned.
It was scrubbed from head to toe
And in the process lost what made it the unique house it was.

When it came time to that one little room,
The blood clung to the walls
Not wanting to ever let go.
The contractors gave up hope and painted over the remaining history.

It was painted the darkest of black,
The only color that could disguise all of the things
That were intended to be hidden
On the four walls
Of the small, small room.