This.
And what about this, you may ask?
Well, this is my recently repainted, yet-to-be-recarpeted spare room after it suffered some water damage from upstairs.
I've lived in this flat for 10 years. Yep, we're stupefying friends, family, and London lettings agents left and right with that one.
Whether they realize it or not, my readers are already well-acquainted with this space--it's Rand's flat in my past-present paranormal novel, What the Clocks Know. And this particular room is where Margot has many-a haunting dream in her sleep... But to me, it's my office / guest bedroom / husband's closet. Oh, and I suppose bike rack (thanks to a very, very high ceiling). That's how we roll in London. Life in miniature.
Anyway, what I'm taking my sweet time getting around to is that it's been a decade since I've seen this room empty like this. The first time since we moved in. And it's weird. Though I've imagined it this way many times over the years (in mentally/emotionally preparing for when we do ultimately move), to behold it like this now has made me realize something:
When we move out, it'll be like we were never here.
Our first years of marriage, the first home we made together, every book I've written so far, all the trials and tribulations of international relocation we've endured, the dozens of people we've hosted, the laughs we've shared, the tears we've (okay, I've) cried, everything we'll have learned and dreamt of and achieved in the span of over a decade--*poof*
Vanished.
Like Keyser Soze.
(And Kevin Spacey, for that matter.)
None of this will disappear from our minds and hearts, of course. We're lugging all our memories with us when the time comes. Only for a cleaning crew to come through and wipe the slate clean behind us, leaving everything just as we'd found it in 2008. Just like every previous tenant/owner had before us and will after. These containers brimming with our lives...they just return to empty spaces.
But do they?
Since celebrating our 10-year anniversary in the UK, we've been reminiscing a lot about our time here, and somehow this whole water-damage/renovation fiasco has shifted our nostalgia into hyperdrive. So, at first I looked at this empty room where I literally started my writing career and felt such sadness that all that meaning will just get erased as someone else's blank canvas to paint on. I can't take it with me. But will it ever truly let me go?
As I said to my husband the other day, "We're gonna leave so much energy behind in this place! The next tenants are screwed!!" And then we both laughed because we both know it's so totally true.
These walls...they've locked us in. A part of us, anyway. We've energetically imprinted ourselves on this space, so in a sense will always be here, just as I believe a part of everyone else who's lived here still does, possibly affecting us in ways we don't realize. You don't have to be dead to haunt a place.
And haunt places we do, which is what I like to write about. It didn't take moving to London for me to contemplate the spaces I live in and pass through, the people who've shared those places, and the individual and collective experiences to be had (and have been had) in them. The past always lives in my present, and I reckon the future does as well. Layer upon layer of life in a single space.
Think about it.
You can read about it, too. Here http://getbook.at/SFAS and here http://getbook.at/WTCK. 😉
In the meantime, since that first photo was taken earlier this week, our spare room has indeed been recarpeted and refilled with our schtuff, as we're not going anywhere just yet. So, here's to filling these walls with more memories and manuscripts! And to the energetic prints we'll leave behind, living on in our wake. 👻 😊
