An empty house is very calming, but in a way that you can look into and appreciate, but not participate in, because its lack of life to participate in is precisely the source of its still serenity. And it only gets cleaner, and gleams more perfect the harder you work to get it back as you found it. Able to touch, but not breath in the rare atmosphere your very inability is filling the empty, sun painted rooms with, bigger and more abundant now than ever they were when you could truly be in them. Your life here has become silent, and the quiet space exhales. It could never be like this for you. It only reveals its beauty as you look back. You didn’t clean it like this, you didn’t clear it like this. Would you have ever seen it like this if you had? Would you have needed to leave, and set it free?
Then hits the moment you realise there’s nothing else left to do.
I am finally here in the emptiness. Nothing left to scrub. Nothing left to pack. And it’s time to go as the sun leaves first. I’m trying to absorb it, the feeling of being here in an important double-year moment of a fleeting life. But this moment isn’t that. I can’t see my life here anymore. The place is the same, but dismantling this setting has taken so much time and pure essence that it feels as though the phase it represents hasn’t even lasted until this bittersweet end. Dismantling it has become its own phase. I haven’t been, for a while, in the place I’m only just leaving. And so how do you leave? How long is it ok to stare into it longing for a reflection? Door ajar, peering in after pacing through over and over. I am dry immersed, I’m here where the memories live but they can’t absorb me into them anymore. I am a ghost of myself that lived here, stalking the hallways long after my life here ended. And yet here I still am and here I still live. And that’s torn me apart, and it’s been fine. But this is the last night I will be here as myself, in a place that I happened. How can I say goodbye over this distance? All that looks back is finality, and I realise I don’t know what I’m looking for here. Old sights and sounds, but the lighting has all changed. This isn’t my place, but I’m still here looking for visions in empty rooms. I wanted to leave but by now it hurts to go. I am alone here for the last time. It is cleaned and sanitised of my existence. It has let me go, but as I cross the precipice and look back inside, unable to close the door or break my gaze from drinking it’s final sight of somewhere so familiar and dear, in ways I didn’t know it was until my last moments with it, it still wants something. I can’t look away. It has let me go, but there is something stopping it from releasing me. It has let me go, but I am still holding onto a part of it. A part that I give back to it the second I break my gaze and shut the door on the last sights of the backdrop to an era. Saying goodbye to a silent old friend. It needs that part of it I’m keeping, the part I’m trying to drink in as much of as I can right now, and for entire weeks before, the part that I surrender as soon as I go. And it hurts to give it that. But after all it’s done for me, I owe it to this old place.
Quit Vision 