TBD (To Be Demolished) / Sam Goodman

TBD (To Be Demolished)

WORDS Sam Goodman VISUALS Reagan Allen

I stole my father’s sweatshirt before I flew for Boston. Its burntorange fabric smelled like California free and wild, and suburbia hot and dry, clear sky, miles from city smog. The feeling of an early morning car ride and linen, fresh out of the dryer. Mother tucks and folds my bedding and I am safe and I am warm.

Now that is home.

Then, the warmth goes and I am on my way. To Boston. It smells. Like the city. And students line the bleak walls of our esteemed institution. Smoke break. Huddled together, they discuss artful things (as young people do) and I huddle with them in my burnt-orange. Now, this is home.

I stand beside tobacco clouds — of which I did not (yet) inhale — and when Tremont winds claw at our paper-thin cheeks, I wrap my hands around a new friend’s flame. The smell seeps into my hot and dry, clear sky, car rides and I return to my linen to find a new stench.

As I bounce from childhood bedroom to dorm room, I think of the smell of stale smoke seeping from the chapped lips of the city’s boldest and bravest. I have lived among them, yet somehow with one foot in the door, one foot out. Not on the periphery, rather waiting in anticipation for my next opportunity to fly. Home. I once wrote on demolition, foundation, framing, furnishing. On axing wood to using raw materials, building something new. Now I have done the “something new” and am ready for destruction again.

So before I get too comfortable with the smell of smoke between my nails, form a habit I cannot kick, I will leave behind scratched-up walls and dust and dirt. An old mini fridge I have no reason to keep. I will leave my magazine position to someone new and I believe everything is accounted for. Some of what was once a dream, waiting to be unpacked, will be reorganized in boxes again, most of it thrown into piles of trash.

And in four and a half semesters of college, I learned about four and a half things:

1. On demolition: You have to be broken down to be built again. You learn a hoodie will not cut the February cold and sometimes the only way to walk is alone. When you are at your lowest, you crash through the basement, back to the ground, the open sky whooshing above you.

2. On foundation: When you think you are grown, you have more growing to do. I packed away 17 and did the same to 18, 19, and suddenly, I have forgotten. Why do I feel haggard and jaded, rotted at something-years-old? Why do I feel like the floor has crumbled beneath me? Though you can rush to patch up the deteriorating floorboards, you are probably better off just picking up the jackhammer.

3. On framing: People disappoint. Bleak, but true, nonetheless. When I first arrived, just before I reeked of smoke, I asked myself when the new people around me would become “my people.” As teenagers, college students, twenty-somethings we expect those around us to be load-bearing beams, handrails, and guideposts. In reality, all we can offer one another is drywall. I built a paper-mâché shelter to keep me safe and, as the blueprint unceremoniously predicted, those walls quickly crumbled.

4. On furnishing: Decorate to destroy. As a professor of mine once jokingly asserted to his class of on-campus students, “the crap you buy for your dorm rooms is built to break.” Again, brutal but true. Tchotchkes shatter and posters rip. Paint chips and nothing sticks. Walls resist the pretty and perfect. They know what lies just beneath. It will take half the time to tear it down as it did to tack it on.

4.5 On demolition: Burn it down, start again. When the final flame is extinguished, pick through what is leftover. From the fire, through the ashes, look for what remains. Decide if it can — should — be pieced back together. And after you audit your collection, after you have tossed what you no longer need, get right back to building again.