grief in the empty spaces
As a new (now only new-ish) architecture student, my foundational education has taught me to think spatially. When applying this outside of my architectural work, it's had many interpretations.
By the last few days of April, I found that playing piano in my wide, empty building foyer felt less like an intimate lounge and more like the concrete shell that it was. The sun-lit couch that I would take my naps on was suddenly chilled even when the windows were shut. The impending end of first year was a farewell to so many nooks and crannies that I called home, many to be replaced by the new class to come. I can only hope that the love and joy that has been ingrained in those spaces seeps out into the new year.
When I sat down for one of my last caf coffees of the year, looking around at the increasingly empty dining room, I had the same mildewy feeling as when I stepped into my grandmother's house for the first time after she left. When there's resounding silence in a space, it allows you to pinpoint the most important details with far more clarity.
Suddenly the living room where we all clamored in after dinner with coffees was empty, with only indentations in the couch marking the nights spent alone. The basement where my brother and I watched VHS movies twice, thrice in one sitting, was without the laughter we once echoed in it. We would finish a movie, and then sit back as it rewound, watching people move in reverse motion like it was another movie in itself. My father's old bed where I used to take naps, and sleep over in, stayed made. My grandmother's bed, however, stayed unmade for weeks until my aunt decided to change the covers, washing it of her presence.
This is not to say that the death of such a small period of time adds up to the loss of one's entire life in any way. However, when you look at the marks that each instance made on the surrounding environment, like the names we signed on our studio ceiling, the familiar feeling of loss rises again. A story of comparison begins to form in the differences of memory and reality. Where I cried on the bench outside the architecture building after a particularly hard studio session, upper years shared a cigarette break the next evening.
I no longer categorize grief only in terms of lost life. I've found more grief in understanding the closing of chapters, in the loss of time. Whenever I visit my grandmother's, each time it becomes less her house and more just a house.
Yesterday, I visited to retrieve buttons from the basement (my grandfather was a tailor) for a project idea, and when I unlocked the back door and stepped in, I realized the house didn't smell so strongly of her anymore. I breathed it in for a second, and then it was gone. After I had gotten the buttons, I made myself a cup of coffee on her stove and sat in her backyard grass to write. I sat in pure silence and took frequent breaks to watch the birds and squirrels run around me. One squirrel tried to dig at the beans we planted in her garden and I whistled until he ran away.
Sitting in such silence with only the world and other people's backyard joys as my music showed me that her house, her backyard, everything no longer had her mark. Some things remained, like the stick leaned against the side of the house she used as a cane, or the arugula she planted that pops up every spring, but she hasn't been here for a long time now. It's a house, and a backyard.
I guess I feel the same way about my desk at school in some regards. I've stained it with red ink from the numerous times I've spilled things, and there's coffee rings on coffee rings. For now though, it's just a desk with a few stains. In September, it won't be a desk, it'll be someone else's desk. The way her house is a house, to be someone else's house. I've found great comfort in inhabiting those periods where something is just a thing. A house, a desk, a yard. Sometimes stepping back and looking at things objectively is all you need to carry on again.