Sacred Space
Or: "There's Gnome Place Like Home" (the title to a story we made up one night before we fell asleep)

Not unlike what others do in awkward situations, we found ourselves talking about the weather. "I remember last spring being very cold," he said. "That's funny," I said. "I remember last spring being very warm."

When I woke on Tuesday morning I carried on in the apartment like I had so many times before. Despite my absence and the passing of so many months, I still found my things scattered about like I belonged there. My glasses were on the window sill by his keys, my hat and mitts there too. My bag sat where the hallway met the living room, my phone on the table, my clothes in a pile on the floor. I saw evidence of my previous presence: the Dali postcard I got him still stuck to coffee table, the empty Christening wine bottle by the sink, and I wondered if the pocket watch I gave him still hung from his bed post. Even when I arrived, I immediately went to sit on the rug and not the couch, and knew to let it mellow in the toilet. When he gathered his things in the morning and mumbled aloud, "Now where is my wallet?" I told him it was on the side table beside the hookah, just because I knew.

I remember the first time I saw the place. As we walked towards it, I kept guessing whether it was this, that, or the other house over there and when we finally approached it, I remember thinking that it was better than any of the houses that I had guessed en route. He was so excited. And I shared his infectious joy as I breathed in the long hallway, full of light. I swooned over the big window and the size of the rooms. I smiled in the tiny kitchen. We made plans in the living room; where the couch would go, how the rug could lie in the corner with cushions, how there'd be no t.v. to contend with. We talked about paint colours. The apartment was in no way mine, but I felt like I became a part of it that very first day. We thought about christening it right then and there, but we decided against it (only to do it a week after, accompanied by a bottle of cheap wine). After he finished struggling to lock the door, we hopped off the steps and began the first of many, many walks that were to follow. Walks that would take us to our respective work places and various cafes for breakfasts. Our walks took us to the bus station, to the market, to the park. We discovered the streets and the cute houses that lined it, especially the one with the music stand in the kitchen. We discovered a magical front lawn with turrets and towers and dragons. We discovered neighbours who let us borrow a microwave one spring day. Sometimes we walked in silence and often we shared stories, but always, we walked... side by side... And there's something in me that has attached a lot of meaning to not only those morning walks (and sometimes, afternoons and evenings too), but to the corner where his place sat, the way it felt when we first stepped outside, me breathing in the sound of him locking the door behind us.

When we left on Tuesday morning, I briefly noted that locking the front door no longer took as much time as it used to. And I didn't note until later that when I went down those steps that it would be the last time I'd do it. But when we hit the sidewalk I had to stop myself from turning around and saying goodbye to a place that was never mine, yet felt like it had become a part of me.

It's funny, how your memory works. Mine, I've often thought, is photographic, for lack of a better term. Without as much as closing my eyes, I can not only see the whole space before me, but I can feel it. How do I share the memories that those deep ochre yellow walls hold? What joys the kitchen shared, what secrets the bedroom knows... Can you hear the music we heard? How do I describe the scent of a space that instantly put me at ease, that I breathed in at nights feeling like I belonged? How do I tell him that a whole Spring of joy was spent in there, that I associate a season of sighs of relief and breaths of fresh air with that space, and him, the man that occupied it? And how I ache now that he has moved on and out, that it is gone from his life, and symbolically with it, me too. The last night that I spent there was the only night I ever slept truly alone - and there is probably more significance to that than I care to acknowledge.

It was a particularly warm day, that Tuesday morning, and I couldn't help but feel like it was spring while we walked. The rising sun in the distance caught me in the middle of a sentence and my train of thought became a wreck. It was gold and orange over the rooftops and the birds were chirping. I stood still for a second and let the scene wash over me. There it was, in an instant, the whole of what it felt like to be with him: fresh, crisp morning air, the warming glow of the sun, the faint chirp of birds in the distance. It was Spring again, the season of our births; it was Renewal on the corner of Lancaster and Mansion.
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