Where Do These People Go?

Sometimes the question arrives without ceremony. It doesn’t announce itself as grief. It comes disguised as a small task, a harmless errand, a reason to leave the house. I found myself driving longer than necessary, letting the road stretch, letting the motion replace my very own thought. There is something about movement that invites memory as if the mind loosens when the body keeps going.

Memory needs matter. we deeply rely on what is solid, fixed, unmoving. Walls. Windows. Kitchens. We attach entire lives to objects that cannot remember us back. As if meaning could be stored inside stone. As if time could be folded and kept safe inside rooms. We ask places to hold what we cannot carry alone.

Last summer in Seville, I returned to the summer house. It was early — that orange-yellow hour when morning feels unfinished. I was alone in the kitchen. The sun slipped through the window quietly, almost cautiously, as if it didn’t want to disturb me. And suddenly the space felt crowded.

Not with bodies. With absence.

I remembered how the room once felt when everyone was there. How it held noise without effort. How fullness used to be its natural state. I almost saw them standing near the counter. Almost heard the soft chaos of life unfolding. It wasn’t imagination exactly it was recognition and tender soft recollection. I stayed very still, refusing to blink, as if movement might collapse the moment. As if they might leave again.

Then came the last family gathering. My grandmother’s house — or what remains of it. They had remodeled it. Polished it. Corrected it. Every trace of having been lived in was carefully erased. The house had been emptied of its memory, turned neutral, presentable, anonymous. It no longer knew us.

I walked through rooms that felt unfamiliar in a way that was almost cruel. Not because they had changed, but because they no longer testified to what had been. Every detail I remembered had been replaced by something smooth, something forgettable. What I felt wasn’t just sadness. It was disorientation. A quiet panic. The sense that the past had been dismantled while I wasn’t looking. That the evidence of love, noise, conflict, togetherness had been quietly removed, leaving me holding memories with nowhere to put them.

And that’s when the question rose not as a thought, but as a wound.

Where do these people go, when the places stop holding them?

Where do they live when memory loses its shape, when rooms refuse to remember, when time edits without mercy?

And the question I don’t like admitting, even to myself:

Why didn’t they take me with them?