We develop an intimacy with the home much like we do with a body. In the same way we learn to love, we learn to unlock a finicky doorknob and how to move through the house to have the least amount of impact.

These bones are our bones.

Architecture holds history, it becomes a witness to the movements which took place even as memory fails to take root. Rooms become recordings of movements.

I know you by your footsteps and your gentle tapping of dirty dishes making themselves clean. It is warm underneath this blanket of dust collected from homes which used to belong to us.

And here a house that has seen three people get up, sit down, and leave, is still holding ground. Old smudged glass which holds texture—The smearing of breath. This door is not an entrance but a way to be.

And we wonder what we are to do with all this living.

How much of you is sustained through what is left?

Grief finds a home here. It tucks itself in corners and slows the body to simple movements. Joan Didion once wrote, “Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”

We have a daily awareness of when someone has left the house, certain rituals which make themselves known by the lack of you. We remember most things through a house, every memory is stored within a room. For months I couldn’t touch that doorknob without thinking about the last time you opened the door and walked through it.

A piece of bronze, the size of a vertebra, rubbed between the thumb and forefinger as a daily gesture to witness the permanence of touch.

Gaston Bachelard once wrote, “the house is the topography of our intimate being, both the repository of memory and the lodging of the soul – in many ways simply the space in our own heads.”

How much of you remains in this home?

We barely own our bodies much less the environment which they occupy.

We all hope for home to be a place where you can return to, or at least the leading road would still be there. But time makes do with all (things soft) under the sun. Roads change direction, houses are built and are torn down, whole countries become locusts become famines, slip under this dirt, make use of soft spots and doorways which don’t lead to entrances. And once those structures containing us are gone where does memory know to go?

veronikaz@usf.edu

321-525-5674