13–20 minutes
This text was written as a companion to Undulating Husk: Memory Vessels. A condensed extract of approximately 200 words was submitted as part of a written portfolio application to the Royal College of Art. What follows is the original text from which that extract was drawn. Some grief is survival out of spite. This is the other kind.
Memory collapses when too much love tries to stay.
The room is white. Not the white of a fresh start or a clean page or any of the other optimistic lies that colour gets told when it is absent. This is the white of waiting rooms and held breath and places that were never meant to be lived in, only passed through. The walls hold nothing, not a mark, not a shadow of something that once hung there, nothing that would suggest any human being had ever made a decision in this space. The ceiling is low and panelled and presses down with the quiet authority of something that has never been questioned. Two small windows sit high on the far wall like an afterthought, admitting a flat northern light that illuminates without warming, the kind of light that shows you everything and flatters nothing. This is what they export, this deliberate blankness, this negative space dressed up as design philosophy, Scandinavian minimalism as a lifestyle, a brand, a thing people pin to their moodboards without ever having to live inside it. The plumbing groans when the shower runs and the smell that follows is drains, deep and sulphurous, the underside of the building announcing itself without apology. Sometimes the smell arrives for no reason at all, just a reminder that the infrastructure is indifferent to you. The hay that was once the dominant smell of the room, clean and sweet and animal and alive, has been losing ground to it for months.
You stop saying I. Not on purpose. Not for effect. Just quietly, and then often, until someone corrects you and you laugh it off like it is sleep deprivation. It isn’t.
Outside, somebody is screaming. Not in distress, just in the way people here scream, which is without consideration for the fact that walls exist, that other lives are being conducted on the other side of them. A lawnmower starts up somewhere below. They mow once a week here, trim and edge and maintain the appearance of the grounds with a dedication they reserve for nothing else, a performance of orderliness over the surface of something that smells of bad pipes and indifference. The noise doesn’t stop. It never stops. But you have learned to hear through it, the way the ear learns to filter, the way the mind learns to go somewhere else while the body stays in the room, present and uncomfortable and thoroughly done with being here.
What you listen for instead is smaller. The shift of weight on laminate. The particular sound of a Netherlands dwarf rearranging himself in his bedding. Munch, furious and compact, a raging little potato of a rabbit who smells, inexplicably and wonderfully, of really good hay, the kind of hay this country cannot seem to produce, and you find yourself pressing your nose to the top of his warm head the way women smell newborns, seeking in the scent of him something that the room has failed to provide, something living and familiar and uncontaminated by sewage and regret.
You don’t remember how many litter fluff butt terrors were in the room that day. The memory has folds now, creases that weren’t there before, places where the image bends in a direction you didn’t choose. You remember the sound, a click, a thud, something small giving out, not loud like the crack of dawn but final as a snuffed candle. The ridiculous part? She had already collapsed when you walked into the room, you heard nothing, there is a complete disconnect between a happy bunny stuffing herself with hay and the collapsed one on the floor, with a whole load of scenario designed and implemented in between to substitute the void of what the hell actually happened. That’s the part that doesn’t let go.
Muffin had been at your feet that morning in the pale winter light that came through those high small windows and managed even then to find her, to settle briefly on her fur and make her look golden, which she was, your six-spring lady-bun, skittish and sweet and deeply uninterested in being touched by anyone, little bitch she was so smoochable, who was not Munch, who had been grooming every stray whisker from her face with the focused tenderness of something that does not know it is being watched and would not care if it did. Their fluffle was your makeshift family. You went for a shower. You came back to a more miserable version of the room than before.
You move around her like she’s asleep. Like she might open her eyes and scold you for crying. But the body doesn’t change. It cools. It stiffens. And something in your chest starts to mimic it, a slow cooling, a small bracing against what the body already knows before the mind will admit it. You keep replaying the moment in your head, but every time it gets harder to tell who moved first, you or her. Her name feels heavy when you try to say it, like a word that no longer belongs to the world of the living, like something that has crossed a threshold language wasn’t designed to follow.
You talk to the others like nothing is wrong. They twitch, they shift, they avoid the space where she used to be with the particular animal intelligence of creatures who understand absence before they understand death. The air is different and they know it. You pretend, because naming the absence might make it permanent, might press it through the floor of the temporary and into something that has to be carried. You catch yourself saying ‘we’ out loud, even though ‘we’ is not true anymore. You say they’re all fine, as if she’s included, as if she’s watching from a corner you haven’t looked at yet, tucked behind the rabbit tower in that way she had, small and private and entirely herself, while she peeped on the world and stomped at anything not sanctioned to make Muffin-approved noise.
Munch won’t leave the bed.
You try not to make a sound. The others are still here and they watch you the way prey animals watch weather, with their whole bodies, ears making small adjustments, noses reading the room for information you don’t know you’re broadcasting. You think you said goodbye. But the air is full of unfinished sentences, the particular static of a grief that has not yet found its shape, that is still moving between forms, looking for somewhere to settle and finding nowhere clean enough.
A slip becomes a pattern. A pattern becomes voice. You start saying ‘she’ instead of ‘I’, not on purpose, not for effect, at first only in your head when trying to explain what happened, then aloud when recounting a memory, until someone corrects you and you laugh it off and the laugh doesn’t last long. You ask Munch if he remembers. His nose twitches but the stare doesn’t break. He is waiting. You don’t know for what. Maybe for her. Maybe for you to stop pretending you’re someone she left behind. You try again, higher pitch, softer tone, the particular voice you used to use when you spoke as her, for her, the one you gave her so she could answer back, the whole private language of it, the way you would say something and then reply in her voice so she would stop and stare and get that small electric excitement in her ears, and he looks, just once, and something cracks in the fabric that holds you together, because you have lost not only her but the voice you made for her, the one that lived in your mouth on her behalf and has nowhere to go now, the one that made her real in a register beyond memory.
And then grief stops being something that visits and becomes something that unpacks. She moves in without asking, peels your name off the door, learns the layout of the place by the second night, knows where you keep things before you’ve looked for them. She has footage. She always does. She replays it nightly, silent scenes that unspool behind your eyelids with the quality of something that has been watched so many times the edges have worn smooth, and the details that remain are the ones you can no longer verify, so you stop trusting any of them. She corrects you instead.
‘That wasn’t her bowl’.
‘She didn’t run that way’.
‘She didn’t like being held like that. That was you’.
The corrections are not cruel, exactly. They are just precise. The kind of precision that strips the kindness out of memory and leaves you with something harder and truer and more difficult to carry. The memories begin to separate. You watch them like film played across fogged glass, her image sharpening as yours dissolves, as though grief is a process of subtraction working in only one direction, removing you in order to preserve her more faithfully.
Your facial skin is on fire like someone rubbed stinging nettles on your face then buried it in a nest of fire ants throwing sodden balls of acid until you’re swollen and bruised like a forgotten peach. Your bones ache in the mornings, not from age, not from the cold that comes through the gaps in the window frame of this temporary apartment that smells of drains, but from weight, something slow and deliberate settling into the joints, the body keeping a score the mind has stopped reading. Grief creeps down the throat like cold fingers pressing from inside, and beneath it breath becomes a negotiation, shallow and frayed at the edges, caught like fur in lungs too tired to protest. The room presses its blankness against you and the blankness has no interest in what you are carrying.
It gets harder to remember what you used to sound like.
You record a voice memo to test it. Press play. Listen. The voice is yours in pitch and in the particular shape of your vowels, the accent you could not sand down to Swedish standards no matter how long you stayed here, but the cadence is hers, soft and careful, weighing each syllable before releasing it to make sure it won’t disturb something resting under the sternum. Your chest tightens on the exhale, not panic, but maybe the slight fear of the day when you are used to her not being here, the body reorganising itself around an absence, shoulders inclining inward as if to shield something hollow that has taken up residence where something solid used to be, hands growing cold before you notice them trembling.
Grief corrects you again.
‘She didn’t talk like that.’
‘She didn’t forget things.’
‘You’re the one who didn’t say goodbye properly.’
You stop arguing. There is no point arguing with something that has the footage.
You hold the donut bed some nights. It is a large fluffy blanket rolled into a sausage, curved into a circle, layered over more bedding, the thing you built for her in those last hours because she had stretched out in her final moments and you needed Munch to be able to reach her face, and so you tidied it around her, arranged her for him with the careful hands of someone performing a task that grief has not yet fully registered as grief, the blubbering and the singing of small songs and the doing of what needed doing all happening simultaneously in the way that only occurs when love and practicality have been living together long enough to operate as a single system. The fleece holds the shape of her still, the curl and the press of something small that trusted the softness enough to settle into it completely. You tell yourself you hold it for comfort. But it is starting to feel more like a map, like you are trying to remember how she lay, where her paws folded, how she breathed, where she went.
Munch stops responding to your voice altogether now. Not the way he did before, when grief was still fresh enough to excuse, but in the settled, deliberate way of something that has reorganised itself around a new reality and does not need you to catch up. You call his name in the white room and the white room gives it back to you unchanged, and somewhere beneath the smell of drains and the sound of the lawnmower doing its weekly performance of orderliness, something in you registers that you have been here too long, in this country, in this apartment, in this particular quality of loss, and that the months have accumulated in the joints the way weight does, quietly and without drama, until one morning you notice you are carrying something that was not there before and cannot now remember when it arrived. The crack that opened when she died has not closed. It has simply become part of the architecture. You file it in the place where things go that you are not ready to look at, alongside the drains and the laminate and the particular hopelessness of northern light through windows too small and too high to show you anything worth seeing.
You stop dreaming in first person.
Your fingers slip along the corduroy of the mattress, brushing the indent where she once curled, as your thumb taps play on a photograph you have looked at too many times. It is her in the garden at home, the real home, the one waiting in storage with its colour and its chaos and its hot pink window frames and the neon green planter she used to nose around, the home that smells of good hay and actual life rather than Swedish plumbing and the particular hopelessness of laminate. The photo looks unfamiliar now. You know it’s her but something’s off. The eye is wrong. The light isn’t how you remember it. You look at it too long and the image starts to shift and you check the time, the app, your own reflection in the black screen, everything is still. Except you. The skin feels too thin some nights, like grief has worn it from the inside, like breath itself might split it open if you dared inhale too deeply, so you try not to.
You wonder if grief is building her from scraps. If every time you forget a detail she stitches it into something else, something closer to truth, or worse, closer to what you needed her to be, which is a different thing entirely and a more frightening one.
Your name feels foreign now. It sits in your mouth like a guest no one invited, taking up space without contributing anything, waiting to be acknowledged without giving you a good reason to. You try to say it aloud and it lands flat against your teeth like a stone dropped in shallow water, weighty and incongruous, and the sound scratches your throat on the way out and leaves the taste of copper behind, the taste of something that has been held too long in a closed space.
You wake up in her bed. You don’t remember lying down. You are curled the way she was, tight and folded and soft at the edges, and the fur lining still smells like her, or maybe it smells like you now, the two scents having occupied the same space long enough to become indistinguishable, and you have stopped checking which is which because the answer no longer seems to matter in the way you thought it would. The ache settles into your hips. Your ribs tighten around something that doesn’t move. Limbs feel heavier each morning, as if the body were learning how to belong to the earth again, surrendering mass back to gravity one slow ounce at a time.
There are nights when you hear the sound of movement, tiny paws across laminate, and you tell yourself it is one of the others, Jackson probably, who has never fully understood that some hours are for sleeping, and you don’t check, because you don’t want to confirm it, because you want to keep the ambiguity alive for a little longer, the possibility that it is her, navigating the room the way she always did, close to the walls, following her own private geography. Grief feeds on ambiguity. You have been feeding her well.
You begin to narrate your day as though she might understand it, or as though the narrating itself is a form of address, a letter sent to an address you can no longer verify. She’s tired. She didn’t eat. She misses them. You used to mean her. Now it might be you. Now it might be both, two griefs occupying the same pronoun, hers and yours pressed together in the small white room that smells of drains and temporary and the faint sweet ghost of hay that still clings to Munch’s warm ridiculous head.
You still feed the others. You still clean. You still function. But you do it with her hands, her patterns, the rituals she taught you without trying, the particular order of things that became your order of things so gradually you cannot now locate the moment they crossed over. Your muscles remember her movements before your mind does, the way she folded blankets, the way she cleaned bowls, small and precise and reverent, every gesture inherited now through skin rather than memory, the body carrying what the mind is no longer reliable enough to hold.
One night, you call your own name. It doesn’t echo. It doesn’t return.
You realise something has settled into your chest, not grief exactly, not memory exactly, but a shape. Familiar. Small. Still warm. The shape of something that lived close to you for long enough to leave an impression in the tissue, the way the donut bed holds the curl of her, the way the mattress holds the indent of where she used to sleep. She didn’t come back. You didn’t leave. The collapse isn’t loud. It never is. It’s quiet. Reverent. And when they find you, if they find you in this white room in this temporary country that smells of its own plumbing and its own self-congratulation, you hope they call her name. Because that’s who’s left. That’s who stayed. That’s who’s breathing now, warm, small, relentless, where your own lungs once lived. Your breath isn’t yours anymore. It measures in small, soft exhales. Prey animal rhythms. The kind that never forget they’re being watched.
>She died once. You did the rest.
— Recorded by the one who kept waking up