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The Room That Waits

 

By Drawing Poetry

 

 

Some rooms never forget.

 

They carry the imprint of your footsteps in their bones, remember how sunlight used to spill across the floor at exactly 4 p.m. near the end of March, how the door creaked softer when you approached it gently. They do not wait for you, specifically—but for the moment you might remember them. And that is enough.

 

There is a room I visit often, though I haven’t stepped inside it for years. In my drawings, I’ve rebuilt it over and over again. Its geometry is simple: three white walls and one painted darker, a ceiling that breathes in dust, a narrow window almost always shut. No decorations. Just space. Stillness.

 

But I remember the crack in the corner near the floor—a vein, it seemed—as if the room were alive. I used to trace it with my eyes when I couldn’t sleep, decades ago. I used to wonder if it grew.

 

Silence lived there. Not the cold, vacant kind that lingers after abandonment, but something warmer. A silence that listened. As if the room was holding its breath with me.

 

Poem I

The window never makes a sound,

Yet holds the light when none’s around—

A silent keeper, soft and wise,

Of secrets caught in evening skies.

 

It never asked for tales to know,

But still recalls the seated glow

Of someone once who lingered there,

Like whispered ghosts still in the air.

 

 

In architecture, they say the purpose of a room is function. A place to sleep. A space to work. A place to live. But I think some rooms are built for something else. For emotion. For waiting. For remembering. For letting go.

 

This one, I believe, was built to be a threshold—not the kind that commands attention, but the kind that lets you pass through it and become something else. Something tender, something undone. A soft room that hums quietly and holds you even after the tears stop.

 

The kind that doesn’t demand anything of you—only carries you forward.

 

I returned once, years later. It had changed, of course. Someone had painted the walls a glossy white, sealed the window frame, replaced the old terrazzo floor.

 

It looked brighter, cleaner. But emptier, somehow. In a way I couldn’t explain. The vein in the corner was gone. Perhaps painted over. Or perhaps it had healed.

 

But the quiet remained. Different, but familiar. Like seeing someone you once loved after they’ve gone, and they smile at you. And you smile back. And the silence says what the words cannot.

 

 

Poem II

Some rooms wear dusk like old perfume,

Long after sunlight leaves the room.

For memory shines a softer light,

That lingers deep into the night.

 

And absence, like a painted wall,

Can stretch its shadow, wide and tall.

What’s gone still leaves a trace behind—

A shape the heart is slow to find.

 

I sat on the floor and closed my eyes.

 

I imagined drawing the room again. Not in precise detail, but in feeling. One ink line to mark the floor.

 

A shadow in the corner. A faint window-light imagined falling across imagined dust. I would not draw furniture. I would not draw people. This room is not about presence. It’s about residue. What remains.

 

Sometimes, poetry begins where language fails. And drawing begins where memory dims. This room lives somewhere in between.

 

There is beauty in the structures that hold space for what’s no longer there. Beauty in corners that still echo your name. In walls once covered with taped-up poems and lyrics about you—words that said nothing but still felt like you.

 

I often think architecture is misunderstood. We praise the tallest towers, the sleekest facades, the most intricate designs. But sometimes, the most sacred rooms are the quietest ones. The ones that listen. The ones that ask nothing from us, but offer everything.

 

Some rooms are not made to impress.

 

They are made to witness. To hold. To wait.

 

And this room—it’s still there. Still waiting.