Wide Eyes and Goodbyes :

The house stood idle and hollow, stripped bare of any personality, its silence gathering in the corners. This is a home in the strangest of senses. 

Only upon reflection can we see how corridors carved these memories: the peeling paint, the sighing pipes, unknowing witnesses to such chaos and transience. These walls hold the hopes of so many, quiet custodians disguised as constants against life’s unrelenting temperaments.

In an unknown world it bared itself to be known, and what a privilege we dutifully ignored!

Only in leaving do we remind ourselves of our stay, and then comes that familiar panic to desperately recall all the soft subtleties we forgot to savour.

Only by encountering now this space, returned to the form it was found in, can we understand the duality of seeming insignificance and profound sentimentality.

We can see with older eyes how we gather fragments of our dwelling, folding them into pockets for safe keeping. Only in our eyes can we envision our presence, hear the echoes of laughter and feel the warmth in worn floorboards. Signed off and sealed in invisible ink, we have marked this territory.

As such is the quiet law of things, the dust will settle over fingerprints on doorframes, and the pipes will sing for someone else’s shower. The fruit flies will continue to dance around dishwasher real estate, a proud feat of physics and procrastination, and a new flood of liquidised livelihood will reach every corner.

Future residents will never know much of us, like we knew little of those before, but each year there will be another layer draped over, carrying the residue of every gaze, every gesture. My only hope is that they too will look upon this place with eyes as wide as ours.

I hope they remember to use them.