I found myself in the beautiful domicile of someone I love very much.

She was seated on a hidden stool or other seating arrangement close to the ground, not too far from a window that was at her left shoulder ish. 

Her body was situated in a way where it would be hard for her to look out that window without craning her neck, however. 

The room had reasonably and relatively high ceilings, so at first glance, it didn’t seem to be as crowded as it was. But as I looked at the surroundings, the things that were filling up the room we were in, I noticed that they were all in stacks, like being in a showroom that has so many things for buyers or potential buyers to check out that they simply keep the things heaped up on top of each other with a tiny thoroughfare every so often so that the people could go through one stack, perhaps even create a new stack and then move on to another pile of obviously beautiful things—things that may have been hidden under other things, things that may have taken some work to get to, but were made accessible to someone motivated enough. 

So, what was in the stacks that prevented me from going to my girl and giving her a hug upon my appearance into the room? Good question.

As far as I could tell, the two main things were area rugs, or fragments of carpet; you know, the kind with the backing on it, not the kind you could throw into a washer. 

I should note that nearly all of these resembled larger, meatier fragments from a carpet warehouse, meaning they were odd sizes, and also had no visible trim or fringe. 

Some of them may have seemed more luxurious than others, but the only one I could see—probably because it haunted the trash out of me—was some hybrid of cadet blue and teal. (I told you, it was the stuff of nightmares, hah.) 

Anywhoodle, there’s this dominant stack of carpet fragments, many or most of them in the 8‘ x 5‘ or 12‘ x 9‘ range.

 And again, they were all plain colors.

(Did I mention the braised terra-cotta and bleeding-coral shades, which may or may not have ruined my day?) 

Anyway, I mentioned that there were things keeping me from going up to my girl. 

While the carpets looked like the dominant item type keeping me away it was actually the horizontal stacks of what looked like broken paintings, or rather, paintings with broken picture frames. 

The tragedy in all of this seemed to be the fact that many of the frames were so gorgeous and ornate that they likely cost thousands of dollars on their own, regardless of how pretty or ugly the painting was inside. 

The first one I saw had a frame that was 3‘ x 3‘, or rather, the painting within was 3‘ x 3‘, and the frame itself was about a foot in each direction. It looked like something that had once been ancient Japanese style that had been dry-brushed with cadet blue paint that clotted in various places, almost making the whole thing look like wicker instead of high Japanese, or even High French art. 

Anyway, The painting in there was an ugly-to-me impressionist-seeming work, which wasn’t so much ugly as it was cold, because the background seem to be an impression of a lake in the same cadet blue family, except it was a little bit ombre or gradient, and contained some form of pearlescent paint because it glimmered in places.

 Anyway, atop that Lakeside view that was pretty close up (to the point where it looked more like a skin condition than anything until I zoomed out, because I couldn’t stand back really) it was a few daubs of very bright, very beautiful, cardinal red that was the saving grace of the whole painting. 

Although, some breaks in the frame caused the painting to be folded nearly in half, twice or three times so that it fit in the footprint of a laptop computer. 

Another painting appeared to be twigs from close-up, and at the same time, very far away, inexplicably; this was a vertical painting. 

Again, broken, somehow to the point where I had to fold it up, despite the fact that the frame was attached to the silk, on which was painted.

I looked up to see my friend, and she wasn’t looking at me, she wasn’t even gazing around the room, she was staring at a fixed point that I could not determine.

 And instead of sitting on the aforementioned stool, she seemed, rather, to be huddled largely on the floor (knees up), which was a beautiful hardwood, or seemed to be. Or perhaps it was engineered wood, I don’t know. There wasn’t enough of it visible for me to tell, but I did see some molding that was pretty… on the ceiling joint thingie. 

So she’s almost staring into space, and I start to believe that she isn’t just being kept back by the lack of an easy path to me, she’s kind of in La La Land. I’ve become concerned and try to get closer to her. This involves me looking around at my surroundings in order to see what hordes of hoards are blocking me. So that I can make a plan of attack, I mean.

When next I looked back at her, she wasn’t so much huddled on the floor with her knees up and arms around her legs; this time she was lying on her side with her back to the wall. Because she had her head resting on her wrist and hand, she didn’t seem to be in too much distress, not by her posture anyway.

So. More stacks of paintings.

Many of them were several feet square with ornate, elaborate, and or thick frames. But every single one of them folded, unable to stand because of some unseen wound to the frame.

The one I found most striking was an oddly-shaped, three -dimensional, and very very very elaborate frame that resembled the profile or shape of a grandfather clock crossed with a locomotive.

 I have no idea how to describe it, actually, except for the fact that it was top-heavy and north-south instead of east to west. That is, it was taller than it was wide; it was also practically six feet tall and perhaps as wide as someone much thinner than I am.

It was gold-leafed over airbrushed gold paint, or so it appeared to me; the painting, if that’s what you could call it, was a not-quite-glossy black that filled the frame in both senses of the word, to the point where you could only tell that it was the middle of a road or highway, broken by those highway-hypnosis perforated lines that mean you can legally pass another car.

 Because the frame was so irregularly shaped, though bilaterally symmetrical, it meant that part of the alleged highway’s edges were cut off, meaning, I could only tell what it was when I was standing pretty far away from it, and was able to see the part where the sides of the road were very slightly visible.

This particular painting was the most tragic of all, because the only thing ruining it was a deep slash that went straight through it, bisecting it from the place where my throat would begin, height-wise.

 An unseen fracture around the frame meant it couldn’t stand up, meaning she couldn’t just prop it up on a dresser or on the floor. It had to be laying down. 

In fact, that seemed to be the thread tying together all of these odd bits of art: every single one of them, except for the gold one, was internally fractured, or somehow partially-obliterated, so that it could not even be picked up. 

It’s like I’m calling it “paintings,” but what I really mean isn’t “a hearty/hardy and hale stretched canvas that you couldn’t break if you chucked it,” but rather a fragile cloth with a few threads that held the whole thing together.

 The painting of the geometrical flowers, for example, had to be stored folded, and not even into symmetrical folds; in fact, it seemed to be in chunks of trapezoid and dodecahedron, so that you couldn’t even see what was inside of it, unless you unraveled the whole thing. Or rather opened up the whole thing.

 Although, perhaps I didn’t simply misspeak that word, for as I continued my attempted “unraveling” of this situation, I realised that a thread running through this mystery (that of these fallen pieces of artwork) was that each was either slashed or bound to a frame that was broken in place. 

Meaning it didn’t have obvious chunks missing from it. It was as though someone had put duct tape, or that “two-way-mirror” film onto a glass window and then thrown a brick through it. Everything was still connected, but broken almost beyond repair.

 In fact, on the two paintings I have described most, the highway and the impressionist cardinal red flowers, I did actually examine it for several minutes in order to learn what was wrong so that I could fix it. Which I did, by the way, but no amount of tape or epoxy resin could solidify something whose very skeleton and innards were so gutted. 

I looked back up to where my friend was supposed to be, and this time, even though her face was still the same for the most part, all I saw was a cat! A gray and black and white patterned cat… lying in the same position that my friend had been, just minutes before. 

I could not allow this to go on, and realized I would have to make a way, and could not just accept the strategy of trying to hop around these stacks. 

And so I started with what was right in front of me: that cadet blue and teal bit of hell. The rubberized back was falling off in pieces, but there was some type of brittle plastic attached to some parts of it. 

I tried my best to re-fold it before relocating the thing (which turned out to be much heavier than it appeared) so that she wouldn’t freak out, and moved it over to what could only be another stack (on top of a bombe dresser!).  But OK, I’ll take it! That wasn’t so bad, right? I can do this!

Three carpets later, I wondered what insanity had led me to say that.

Folding, folding, folding. 

Moving heavy, intractable bundles to another pile, back-and-forth—to the point where my waist was hurting from repeatedly turning 130° or so degrees, Yada yada. 

I kept doing it, though. 

When I looked up at where she had been, all I could see was a cat laying in the same position. A whole cat!! Her humanity was gone. 

I could not allow this to happen! 

Shifting into high gear, I picked up like eight carpets, which was all that remained in that particular pile, and shoved them into the corner.

I heard the cat start talking, and when next I looked, her face was back. 

Some sixth sense must’ve told me to start in on the paintings, because just as I found myself just under the cardinal red flower painting, carrying it I know not where (which took quite a bit of strength and effort, I might add), I saw one of those frosted-seeming clear pouches with a “toothless” black zipper that Shein likes to use.

This thing was huge, though, unlike the ones that delivered my beloved 1 Corinthians 13 “LOVE!” and Philippians 4:13 “I can do all things through Christ Who Strengthens me!” T-shirts. 

Yeah, this one was probably 2‘ x 4‘ and, oddly enough, propped up in a way that did make me wonder if the frame was even broken.… Until I opened it up, that is. 

This one was in tatters, and barely even looked attached, though there was a single thread sewn through one of the few non-threadbare pieces of silk, securely wrapping it to a splintered bit of frame.   

I couldn’t even tell you what was on the painting, but the girl started speaking here, startling me, because she had back her head and shoulders, knees and toes… but was still part cat apparently. (Ears.) 

“That’s from one of my managers,” she began. “A manager that kind of threw me under the bus, but also recommended me for several nice jobs. She was also my landlord for a bit, and that painting was a housewarming gift. I was glad she thought to get me something, even though we were barely speaking, but it was good for us to stay in touch, even though talking to her grated on my nerves a little bit.” 

I was vastly surprised that she spoke that much to me, for she had been silent most of the time… While I, on the other hand, had been muttering to myself for most of the trip. 

Oh! I was here on a trip, was I? Ooof. 

Well…I seemed to have lost track of time, because while it looked like 10 AM brightness when I’d first arrived, now it was looking like twilight, or later.

 As she saw me noticing the passage of time, she appeared to panic a bit, although she also appeared to have been trying to hide it from me.

“I can’t have come all this way, just to see you struggling and not even get a hug for my trouble,” I began, a bit  playfully, but she took it seriously. Or, rather, she took it as though I had been dissing her. 

“What am I supposed to do? I’m trapped,” she whispered, trailing off. Except I heard what her voice didn’t say. 

“I can’t move forward. I can’t move anywhere. I’m stuck here. I have no place to go.”

And I knew what she meant. 

I just don’t know to this day if she knew what she meant.

Because the truth was, when she said she had no place to go, it wasn’t because there was no place, because she was in what looked to be a reasonably luxurious location. 

What she was missing was space in that location. 

She was trapped behind stacks and piles of things that were once beautiful, but didn’t work anymore; things that still looked beautiful, but were also broken. A tenuous connection between the picture and the frame. Carpets that were falling apart on the inside, but didn’t look too threadbare on top. And vice versa. 

“All of the stuff you have lying around,” I began again… 

“None of this could be used for anything. It might be pretty, but you can’t fix it. It’s not fixable. And even if you could fix it, you don’t have enough room for it; and even if you had room for it, some of the things are actually unhealthy. 

The inside of these frames and the backing on these carpets is ancient now. It’s been sitting here for literally 10 or 15 or 20 years. You have lots of windows. Lots of glass. That’s lots and lots of sunlight. 

Some of these things are so brittle that I didn’t even have to pick them up for them to fall apart. 

Just because the stuff in these stacks is pretty or was expensive or cost you a lot does NOT mean that it has any value to you now. It also doesn’t mean that this stuff is usable or fixable or worth keeping. 

And the more junk you have, the less space you have for non-junk. 

You’re so obsessed with keeping all of the items that you once treasured that you can’t see that they don’t love you as much as you love them. 

You’re holding onto them—not out of loyalty, but out of fear. 

You don’t want to be alone in this empty room with ‘just’ one or two choice things. 

So you’re tricking yourself into thinking that having all your familiar stuff and being in the comfort (zone) of familiarity—which is, in your case, a jail cell—gives you a better life than living in a completely empty room.

 I don’t know how to help you except to pray for you. 

Because all I’ve been doing today is rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic, at the end of the day. 

And as much as I hate to invoke Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, the truth is that their boat did sink.

And it seems to me that you’re beyond the stage of floundering. You’re not even flailing anymore, you are beginning to drown.

 I beg you to get rid of some of this junk that isn’t serving you anymore. It’s not even trying to drown you; it’s just laying there. It doesn’t care enough to help you—not that it could—but it also doesn’t care enough to stay. Would it fight you if you sent it away? 

I’m BEGGING you—PLEASE, girl! Just… let go of it all today.”

(And then I woke up.)