Empty Nest

Think back to the last time you moved... or perhaps the first time. Remember what it felt like to walk through your apartment after all of your things had been taken out? These rooms that have been as familiar to you as your own hand suddenly seem strangely unfamiliar. The physical space is the same, the walls, the windows, the cabinets and floors. You can remember when you made that special dinner for a friend or lover, standing at that stove, lighting candles on a table that stood just there. You burned the chicken a little, but the wine was nice. Or you recall the hours you spent on the sofa in this living room, reading or watching a movie, by yourself or with friends. Those were pleasant times when you snatched a few grains of sand away from the worries of the outside world. And even if you didn't like the color of the walls or the shape of a certain corner, you were home in these rooms for a time. All of that is still here in the shadows of the mind's eye. But now, with all of your personal touches gone, all vestiges of you removed from the space, leaving it bare of personality and foreign as the first day you moved in, the very fact that the space is still the same when everything else that made it home is gone is precisely what makes you feel uncomfortable and lost there. If it were truly and completely different, it would no longer have meaning to you, and you would feel nothing. But its closeness, it's familiarity is what is unsettling when it is now so unlike what you know. Freud called this unheimlich, unhomely. It is not not-home. But it is not home. It is un-home. Recognizable as home, but not at the same time.

This week is spring break week at the university where I work and also at the high school where Darling Wife teaches. She is home with Fergus, but there is no break for me. My campus is not closed, and the staff must still work, unless we take vacation leave, which I do not want to do. So, I sit at my desk in a mostly empty building on a mostly empty campus in a mostly empty town. The students that normally fill the place with superficial cell phone conversations and drunken stumblings are all gone, and there is an eerie silence to everything. Certainly they are annoying when they are here and sometimes even seriously disturbing. But how strange it is when they are not here... how unheimlich. One almost wishes for them back....

....almost.