Vacant Rooms

When I lived in Germantown, Ohio, as a child, my bedroom was on the second floor tucked into the eaves over the front of the house. During my early childhood on Walnut Street, my best friend lived across the meadow and would often come over to play. Although I was much more solitary the older I got, I was a sociable child in kindergarten and enjoyed playing with others. As an only child, this was the only interaction I got with children my own age. One afternoon, we spent hours playing Lite-Brite in my upstairs bedroom. After the day was over, she went home. Yet something very odd happened that day—I can recall the way the afternoon light looked streaming in through the tall windows and the mournful shadows it cast across the floor. It felt as though every corner remembered the sound of her voice, and the house shuddered beneath the long purple shadows in her absence. Suddenly an overwhelming, heavy feeling of complete solitude overtook me. It wasn't just the feeling that I was alone; it was the sense that she had previously been there and now she was gone. Her absence was overwhelming. I remember crying next to my mother, and despite her assurances that she would return to play with me again sometime, I could not shake the feeling of an all-consuming absence.

I mentioned this emotion once before in an essay when I wrote about sitting in an upstairs courthouse hallway immediately following my divorce hearing. My father and I sat on a bench directly outside of the courtroom to give my now ex-husband time to leave, and an extremely heavy sense of loss overcame me. I was, in fact, instantly transported back to my childhood bedroom, where I had felt this eerie feeling once before. Oddly enough, this same marriage produced aching memories of being in the now-abandoned church we attended during our decade-long relationship. While attending Sunday School and working as the unofficial church secretary typing up the church newsletter, I spent a lot of time in the building when the Sunday morning crowds had left, wandering through empty basement corridors and eerie upstairs classrooms built into the church attic, now unused and abandoned for decades. When I was in these rooms, I once again felt a deep sense of solitude and abandonment, and a heavy, otherworldly feeling of absence. There is a certain dread that always accompanies this sensation—I have come to believe that this feeling is present whenever the veil between this world and the afterlife is thin. I believe that this emotion of existential dread that overtakes me is not only supernatural, but indicative of a tragic event that occurred at the location perhaps decades (or centuries) before.

Interestingly, I have felt this same feeling in certain storage rooms in the basement of the office building in which I work. I wonder if at one time the location served as the office of someone who experienced a tragedy or perhaps itself was a location of death. The feeling I get is so strong—and eerie—that it cannot be a coincidence that I feel it in certain locations and not in others. What is this dread that seems to pull at me from the other side? The sensation is light yellow in color, although I am not sure why. As a synesthete, I associate certain colors with shapes and sounds, but it is quite rare that I associate colors with feelings. In the Victorian era, yellow flowers were notorious in the language of flowers, representing disappointment, jealousy, infidelity, or the waning of romantic affection. (As an aside, yellow has been my favorite color since I was a child, which is why my childhood bedroom was painted yellow. Which, of course, brings us to the beginning of our story). Apart from the association of yellow with my childhood bedroom, it must be noted that the sunlight streaming in through the empty classroom in the church I mentioned earlier gave the room a certain yellowish glow. Is this the source of the color that fills my brain during these intense feelings of abandonment and solitude that I feel in these locations?

Maplewood Cemetery in my city is the site of several well-known graves of local celebrities, founders, and prominent figures. Once I visited with my father in an attempt to locate the grave of Jay M. Arena, the Duke toxicologist and pioneer of the poison control movement. (When we got to the cemetery to visit his grave, creepily enough, his headstone cataloged on Find a Grave appeared to be missing from his family plot entirely). In the course of our search towards the end of our afternoon, we came upon a locked family mausoleum that proudly towered over even some of the grander graves around it. As I peered in through the door, I saw a marble bench in the center of the small structure, flanked on either side by wall crypts. At the back of this little room was a beautiful stained glass window, casting watercolor-like shadows across the floor. Although the mausoleum was locked and completely empty, I pictured a widow sitting there, day after day, waiting for something. The presence of a bench implied that someone would sit there—although perhaps completely alone—surrounded by death and the memories of what was. A life past, filled now with only an overwhelming absence. The same creepy feeling I have sensed in my past. Was this feeling caused by the fading afternoon sun that often accompanies this sensation? Was it the locked, empty nature of the tomb? Or was it the presence of death? What about this beautiful structure held the same eerie sense of abandonment that my childhood bedroom had? Why was I overshadowed the same way I was in the empty church classrooms after Sunday services when the crowd had left and I was standing alone in the almost-suffocating silence? Here for the first time, this feeling was associated with an origin I had inferred all along: death. Not only death, but also the finality of death and the knowledge that life must now be lived without someone.

It is the presence of memories that makes this abandonment so profound—in each case, I had been left alone by someone that had previously been there. The silence that remained became engulfed in the knowledge of what once was; it wasn't merely the aloneness that haunted me, it was the sense of abandonment that pervaded every inch of the location around me. As a young child, I had been left alone in my bedroom by a friend who had gone home. In the church, I remained after the crowd had dispersed after Sunday services, standing alone with my thoughts in an empty classroom. As I sat in the hallway after my divorce hearing, not only had my ex-husband left the building before me, but I was now acutely aware of the finality of divorce. He was gone, and he was never coming back—because of my petition for divorce. So too was it with the mausoleum—in my case, viewing the empty tomb and picturing the widow sitting alone reminded me of the inevitable mortality of my own husband. Someday when he is gone, I will be left alone. And yet his memories will fill every inch of our home. It is a destiny that, even years in the future, I struggle to accept.

I realize a certain irony in this aching abandonment that comes with this sense of absence; after all, I have lived most of my life by choice completely alone. I have shunned most friendships to the point that I often struggle to find a reason to leave my house and face society. But in each case I mentioned, the sense of abandonment that I felt in those specific places was something that happened to me—I was left alone, by my own fault or not. The current solitude that invades my life is my own choice. But the solitude of which I speak—it seems to come from beyond the grave. It is as if that same spirit has followed me like an illness, stalking me in the shadows, appearing in places of solitude. I'm not sure I will ever outrun it.