The Gravity of Rooms

The Gravity of Rooms

The bedroom pulls the hardest.
Something in the air itself has changed—
thicker now, heavier, as if the molecules
rearranged themselves around his absence,
filled the vacuum with a denser kind of dark
that weighs on the chest and the eyelids
and the back of the throat where the spark
of speech used to catch and light up
into conversation, argument, the low
murmuring exchanges of a couple
in the dark—and now the room runs slow,
moves through time like amber, like the honey
he kept in the cupboard by the stove.

The kitchen is the second heaviest.
The gravity of meals unmade,
of coffee brewed for one, of dishes
washed alone, of the cascade
of small domestic failures—
the wrong burner lit, the milk gone sour,
the bread left out, the fruit flies thick
above the bowl, the wasted hour
spent staring at the counter
where his keys used to land each night,
the small metallic sound of arrival,
the proof of return, the right
and ordinary music of a man who came home.

Every room has its own gravity now—
its own pull, its own demand.
The hallway sags. The bathroom lists.
The closet cannot stand
the weight of shirts that no one wears.
The whole house tilts toward the gone,
toward the center of a missing mass
that everything still orbits on.

The garage is almost weightless.
He barely spent time there—just the truck,
just the toolbox, just the passage
in and out, the daily struck
routine of pulling in at dusk
and killing the engine and the lights.
It is the one room I can breathe in,
the one room that does not fight
me with his memory at every turn,
that does not press me to the floor
with the specific weight of all the years
he walked through every other door.

I sleep in the garage some nights.
On a cot beside the workbench, cold.
It is the lightest room in the house
and I am tired of being told
by the bedroom and the kitchen
and the hallway and the den
that a man lived here, that a man loved here,
that a man will not walk through again.