Closing the door is an eye-opening experience

Dust collects in the corners and lines the walls where the tackstrip still evidences long-removed carpet. The walls are bare, and they wheeze through nail holes and pinpricks where photos once hung, breathing sorrow, groaning.

Few vestiges of the home’s occupants remain, save for the collection of beer, wine and liquor bottles atop a weathered piano.

Magnets still adhere to the refrigerator, advertising pizza joints, a funeral home and the House of Blues. Strange combination, but then, so were the roommates.

One drawer — the Vice Drawer — is left open. Aspirin bottles and Little Debbie snack cakes sit untouched, forgotten in the rush to remove televisions and stereos and desks and chairs.

We left the house sullen, feeling woozy and nauseated, like we hadn’t truly slept in months, save for the sleep of the drugged, and we never rested.

The daze drops from the doorframes like a curse, throttling all who enter the house and adding dark circles under each pair of eyes.

The house harbored a quixotic dream, a vision born of competence, tempered by defeat and burnished by hope, that bravest and most resilient human emotion. We thought we could reinvigorate the local marketplace of ideas and make a living doing it.

We were half-right.

If kudos, respect, gratitude and pats on the back could be bartered over the counter at some pawn shop, the house wouldn’t sit empty. People gave a damn, but not a dime.

And the list of regrets is remarkably — even defiantly — short.

I regret the failing, but not the striving; certainly not the 44-hour production marathons, the bleary-eyed drives to Morehead City or the ink stains on my hands that I can still see and feel after my skin has been scrubbed raw.

This was a failure — but not a mistake.