The altar

When I enter an abandoned house, I think about how many people once lived and died within these four walls.
Scrupulously I look for fragments of someone else’s life there. Family portraits, holiday and travel pictures, old photos of grandparents.
I steal other people’s souls and dump them in one big pile. From these photographs I will build an altar.
I cut out faces and resize them to make them all equal. They are all the same to me.
I do not know if these people are alive and who they are related to each other, but I place them together. This is how I create relationships.
I don’t think about order and I don’t create a hierarchy. I put adults on a par with children. The pretty ones with the nasty ones. Women with men.
I place an altar by my bed and give them a new home. On the lower edge, under the portraits, I write: “Dedicated to all the forgotten — past, present and future.”
I lie down next to them and fall asleep, and they fall asleep with me.
Someday I will be on this altar, and someone else will sleep peacefully on the bed.