Currently listening to: When were you happy by Laura Marling

Ellis Island.

Those two words, they mean so much to so many.  That journey to this place of survival.  Many came from war torn countries, from persecution, coming to find a new life, and to venture to new opportunities.

I walked through these halls over a century later.  Over a century since it was first built.  To walk these halls and look through these rooms is to bend time.  Where spirits are everywhere and remnants of them are all over.  The scratchings on the walls, the cracked tiles, the fingerprint smudges. Millions of people.

And you think, my God what these people went through.  Examined, detained, sent back, hours and hours on end of waiting.  Some days and days.  That holding area from one world to the next. The new life.

And it seemed almost fitting that the literacy tests  were Biblical.  Bible verses.  The hell that they left and the hopes of an earth-made heaven that awaited.

This was a spiritual quest for so many.  And the building remained through time.  For years after closure in the 1950’s it fell into disrepair.  Neglected by people but not by nature, whose goal was to take all of it back to herself.  To mold over its walls, crack its floors and chip its paint.

But humans returned and through love and time restored it.  People took it back and gained control of it, when it once seemed to control so many.  The building once a decider of so many fates. This beast of a building.  One that could hold people captive, spit them out, or benignly let them pass.  Where people could judge people based on disability, on religion, on race, and on intelligence.

Now it sits quietly in the world, for people to walk through and learn, a reminder of a time when our mistakes were many and different.  When those unchangeable factors about you made all the difference in the world.

May we never become like that again.