This Old House: Chapter Two
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
They did not stop
when I fell.
That was the first lie undone.
I had thought—
in some small, foolish way—
that the taking
was the end of it.
That whatever came after
would be quieter.
Less.
I did not yet understand
how much of me
they intended to keep.
They stripped me
of everything that made me known.
Bark—gone.
Branches—taken like memories
no one asked to hold.
I was reduced
to length
and weight
and use.
Laid among others
who had once stood
as I had.
We did not speak.
Not because we could not—
but because there was nothing left
to say
that hadn’t already been cut away.
The journey was motion
without meaning.
Wheels grinding forward,
carrying what remained of us
away from everything
we had ever understood
as origin.
No roots.
No soil.
No sky that felt familiar.
Just distance.
And then—
the mill.
If the forest
had been a kind of faith,
this was its undoing.
Sound first.
A screaming, endless tearing
of wood against blade—
of something living
being told
it was not.
The air thick
with what we had been.
Sawdust
floating like ghosts
of ourselves.
I waited.
There is a moment—
before anything happens to you—
where time stretches.
Where you are still
entire
enough
to remember yourself.
I held onto that.
The height.
The weight of snow.
The birds that trusted me
with their fragile lives.
I held it
like it might protect me.
It didn’t.
They fed me forward
without ceremony.
Without pause.
And then—
division.
Not clean.
Not kind.
A ripping apart
that turned singular
into many.
I felt myself
become pieces.
Felt the length of me
separated
into something smaller,
more manageable,
more… useful.
This is what they wanted.
Not me.
What I could become
once I was no longer myself.
I searched for the edges
of where I ended.
Could not find them.
Could not understand
how something that had been
so wholly one thing
could now exist
as fragments
that still remembered
being whole.
That was the worst of it.
Not the cutting.
Not the sound.
But the knowing.
That I had been something
complete—
and that completeness
was not required
for what came next.
They stacked us.
Neat.
Ordered.
Interchangeable.
A graveyard
of purpose fulfilled.
Or so they would say.
Time passed
without season.
No rain to measure it.
No sun that felt like guidance.
Only waiting.
Drying.
Becoming something
that would not bend,
not grow,
not change
unless forced to.
I began to understand
the shape of what I was now.
Not a life.
A material.
Something to be used
in the making of other things
that would never know
what it took
to hold them up.
Still—
I remained.
Even here.
Even like this.
Something in me
refused to forget
the forest.
Refused to release
the memory of being
more than this.
And beneath it—
quiet,
steady,
unspoken—
something else
began to form.
Not grief.
Not yet.
Something harder.
Something that would wait.
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Poetry by Britt Wolfe:
This opening chapter lays the foundation for a story told across This chapter moves from belief into breaking—tracing the brutal transformation from something whole into something used. This Old House: Chapter Two explores the loss of identity that comes not just from being taken, but from being divided, reshaped, and repurposed without regard for what once was. Through the tree’s voice, we feel the disorientation of becoming pieces that still remember being one, and the quiet, unsettling realization that purpose can be imposed rather than chosen. It is here, in the aftermath of that understanding, that something new begins to form—not grief, not yet, but the earliest edge of something harder, something that will endure. 💚