Rooms: A Love Letter

Your bedroom must have seen it coming. You’d long moved downstairs to the living room and trips up were fewer and more laboured. Perhaps it got confused when people returned to it and began getting up early in the morning. These last few years, you slept in til noon.

But the removal of the religious iconography? Oh yes, you’re gone, for sure. When the Pope was put into a box – the Pope, not the other ones who needed some kind of preface – you clearly weren’t coming back.

The kitchen got a shock, creaking back into use. Spices were unknown to it, unless you call an onion a spice (you did, once). The microwave was your friend for a long time, hands too shaky to trust with a knife and too weak besides. You preferred the jar of sliced carrots to chopping fresh ones anyway. And why not when it was boiled to mush with the cheapest cut of meat? I wish you had gotten more joy out of food – perhaps the kitchen wouldn’t have such an identity crisis now.

It’s not its fault it was never really a kitchen. Instead it was the hearth, home to two chairs and a gas fire, two pairs of feet up at the end of the day, only one of them actually facing towards the TV. A consistent rhythm: the news worrying you, Nationwide soothing you, soaps and soccer thrilling you. No wonder it hates being a kitchen now, although it begrudgingly appreciates the lack of cigarette smoke. Inside the atoms of the cavity block extension live the remnants of a thousand John Players.

The living room, on the other hand, is thrilled to finally fulfil its purpose, now with a couch comfortable enough to curl up on. We enjoy sitting there with the television on most evenings, not just when there’s an unavoidable clash in programming and one of you (always Grandpa) is banished here. 

The washing line was grief-stricken when it noticed the polyester slacks disappeared, the ones that lasted forever. They followed the sensible jumpers and the warm vests into the charity bin in the supermarket car park. Now replaced by athleisure and band t-shirts you probably didn’t think I’d still be wearing approaching forty.

The rest of the garden doesn’t notice anything. It continues to grow and die off and grow again. The birds don’t know you’re gone; they’re new birds anyway. They make their nest in the hedge in the garden as we strip the wallpaper from the hall.

Annemarie McCarthy lives in Cork, Ireland. She often finds herself writing about the relationship between people and landscape. Her fiction has previously appeared in Aimsir Press and The Amazine.

Bluesky – @annemariemccarthy