There is a house across the street that has been empty since the lady died.
I find myself looking at it. Not with morbidity exactly, but with that particular attention that grief teaches you — the way you start to see the outline of absence where a presence used to be. The windows hold nothing now. The porch holds nothing. Whatever she arranged and tended and moved through daily has been stilled, and the house has taken on that quality that empty houses get, that held-breath quality, as though it is waiting for instructions that will not come.
It makes me think about inhabiting. What it means to live inside a life — to fill rooms with your particular smell and your particular objects and the residue of your particular hungers. We do not think about this while we are doing it. We simply move through our days, touching things, leaving fingerprints on everything, trailing ourselves through our own lives like a thread we assume will never run out.
And then one day it does.
Not long ago I stood inside my father's house. I moved through his rooms slowly, the way you move through water, and I touched things he will never touch again — his cookware, his recipes written in his particular hand, the small ordinary objects of a kitchen that fed people for decades. His scent was still there. Peppermint and tobacco and something beneath those, something I could not name — the smell of cooked food and lived time, the smell that is just a person, irreducible, untranslatable, already beginning to fade. I stood in it like it was the last of something. Because it was.
What goes with us. What stays. What falls into other hands, is rearranged, is carried to thrift stores in cardboard boxes, is forgotten by everyone but the one person who would have known exactly what it meant. These are the questions an empty house asks if you let yourself stand still long enough to hear them.
I struggle with immortality. Not the religious kind — but the human kind, the hunger to leave something that says I was here and I was real and this is what I was. I feel it as urgency most days, and some days the urgency becomes its own kind of paralysis. The weight of the unlived moment, the unwritten poem, the uncaptured thing. The terrible awareness that time is the one currency that does not replenish and I am spending it, always spending it, sometimes foolishly.
I want to leave something tangible. Something that could sit in a room after I am gone and hold me in it the way my father's kitchen still holds him — not a monument, nothing grand, just the true record of a life actually lived. Proof that I absorbed this world rather than merely passing through it. That I was of some sustenance to someone. That the specific texture of my days meant something, added something, left some small mark on the fabric of things.
The house across the street watches me think all of this. Its empty windows neither confirm nor deny.
I turn back to the page. It is the only answer I have ever trusted. The page that holds the smell of the moment, the weight of the question, the proof that on this particular morning a woman sat with all of it and did not look away.
That will have to be enough. Some days it almost is.