brick walls

Mortar and mud, and the crevices between these seemingly impermeable positions. Here live the mice, breeding like only mice can, batches and litters by the dozens, a scattering of lives; gray and shaded in their scurrying ways.

I've spent months now in their home, watching their twists and turns, circus tricks in the kitchen jungle gym of steel shelves and wooden cabinets. I've found them dancing in the cereal, revelling in the crumbs, fornicating under the sink, the steady drip a waterfall to their desperate lovemaking.

I've been told pigeons and giant cockroaches lived here in days past, but I haven't seen a sign of them save for the occasional flap of wings outside my bedroom door, a dried defecation on the wooden steps at the rear of the building. I'll be nostalgic when I leave, as it should be. Here (now), I can't help but feel the weight of this building, its history and its present in constant engagement. It (the building) is an anomaly in a newly minted downtown, a bridge to a seedy, gritty maritime past, where sailors and whores walked the late night streets, and San Diego was truly the first port of call after the Panama Canal.