Dear God,

Thank you for this life that I have. Thank you for this beautiful house, and I praise you for the creation of my lovely family and wonderful friends.

I'm sorry to have to ask you about this...

Lord, they're listening!

Now, yesterday, tomorrow they hear.

They hear the music I play, the words I speak in your blessed name, they hear all.

Now, Lord, I wouldn't mind at all if there wasn't a major problem with that. I'm very grateful for this house, after all.

But...

The ears are tripping over the visitors. Whenever people come around, they are first spooked by the colour of the walls. Then they look closer and are terrified by the ears poking out. They'll run and call me a witch, and then the ears move.

They jiggle with laughter.

Lord, the walls are making me lonely. I feel like I can barely say this aloud because they are listening, they are listening.

What if they are watching too?

Are they conspiring to kill me?

Drown me in their earwax?

Lord, I am afraid!

The walls hear all!

Amen

P.S Please hurry.

The walls of our house are marked by a lifetime of stories. When I was three I had scribbled on the kitchen wall leading into the living room, my mother wasn't in there to supervise me because she was in my grandmother's bedroom. They were both crying. To this day, that scribble marks the anniversary of my grandfather's death. It has since been painted over, but an innocent action will forever commemorate tragedy. 

When I turned six, my mother brought back a tradition that had started when she was a girl growing up with my uncles. My grandmother would mark their heights on her bedroom wall every year on their birthdays to track their growth. I was the fourth child to be added to that wall, and I will never forget my pride when it was revealed that I was taller than my mother when she was the same age. She pretended to be embarrassed to make me laugh, a trait of her's that I'll never forget.

There is a mark by the front door that was left there mother's anger when my father finally returned home in the night after three years of absence. She had thrown a glass plate at him and missed, shattering it against the wall. The sound woke me from my sleep and when my father had walked out the door once more she held me tighter than she ever had before and tried her best not to cry. I understood what she was feeling.

Every single birthday party I ever had, every single Christmas and Thanksgiving, was celebrated within those walls. Those knicks and scribbles and marks will forever stand as a testament to the stories that were acted out in that house. And even if a fire sweeps through its halls and a bulldozer tears it to the ground those moments will never be lost, I will never allow it to be otherwise. Those walls have seen a lifetime of happiness and hardships, they've seen moments my mother and I will never talk about and because of that they know more than anyone. The same can be said for the walls of every house and hearth and hall that has ever been. They stand as a monument to the silent history of humanity that will never be told within schools or churches because they cannot be taught like lessons upon a chalkboard, only experienced. Those little moments in time that we will always remember will forever be marked upon the wall like the height of a six year old boy.