People always say with a wistful gleam in their eye, “If walls could talk….” Well, I’m here to tell you that we want to talk just as badly as you want us to. Trust me, if we could we would. Because it’s taxing to keep secrets to yourself and hold emotions inside you. It makes your paint peel and fills your insides with termite holes. I am fated to stand here, watching people come and go and collecting their secrets until a demolition company decides my time is up.

I’d like to think I’ve seen every facet of humanity possible. I’ve seen people at their lowest, greediest, happiest, most deceitful, most lustful, most beautiful moments. I’ve seen death and sickness and tragedy, but mostly I’ve seen love. Love and heartache. I have no heart, but after watching so many people I know love when I see it. Some people try to make love out of nothing with fake smiles and fake touches, fake kisses and fake proclamations, but this is a manufactured kind of love. It doesn’t even deserve to be called love for all it really is is denial. But true love. True love is what hurts and excites me the most. I’ve seen couples sighing into each other’s skin, twisting their limbs into loveshapes and etching their amorous silhouettes on my surface. Though I am made of plaster and steel support beams, watching them… for a moment I thought I felt warm. I thought I shared their heat, their fire. So much so that at times I was worried I would burst into flames. The sun tended to change things though. Sometimes when the morning came, I was cold again. They were cold again. Not even a faintly glowing ember glittered in their eyes. It was like they had never shared each other.

Those were times when I wanted to scream.

Sometimes being a wall is the worst thing to be. I wanted to scream so bad. I wanted to burst from the screws, wallpaper, and crown moulding holing me back. I wanted to shake them back to their senses and clutch them close to me so maybe they could feel some of their residual warmth that had lodged itself in my insulation. But of course, I am a wall. And those things never happened. Instead I was forced to watch them go. Distant, separate, and completely different people from the angels I had seen stroking each other’s wings the night before. I hate it when people change like that. I hate it when people completely disregard the love they had for each other not so long ago and try to erase it from their memories. There’s nothing I ever wanted so desperately in this world than to show them what I saw, what I know is there.

But one thing I have also learned is that people are stubborn. Even though they always wish for it, humans would never listen to a wall if it talked anyway. They’d rather surround themselves in their own little fantasy than listen to the truth, and that’s fine with me. It has to be fine with me because if it wasn’t, I would just crumble.