I didn’t know her name
But that doesn’t mean she didn’t exist
That doesn’t mean she wasn’t somebody who had lived her life
I sit in my window watching people empty her house of her belongings
Its a strange feeling because there was a time i had seen her and now i never will
She used to order takeout, Chinese maybe, she used to go out into town on her mobility scooter, i remember the first day i met her as i watched her struggle to get her chair out of her door way
Now i am witnessing three men in masks empty her house, struggling to move her once prized possessions into a nameless van
I wonder when it happened
I ask myself if she was alone
I remember the ambulance coming one night late and taking her to hospital, i even told my Mum about it
Clearly no family, for its all going to waste
All these possessions we own for what
To make this time as comfortable as possible
To brag about the earnings or show off the travels
People walk passed the house and they know
They can understand the transaction here
To empty as to refill
Refill with new people
Just a horrific process but reality of this existence
Just one long ugly conveyor belt
People in and people out
Trauma and love and hate all entwined
I wonder who bagged up her belongings
Are these people doing it?
In someone’s private life bagging up the pieces like they hold no significance
Well they don’t do they
We are all just motherboards full of memories and life and times and years and health issues and falls and hangovers and first dances and kisses and marriages and divorce and good weather and bad holidays and nightmares and social media and books and films and music and subscriptions and credit cards and just stuff all this stuff all this consumerism
In a house that was once completely filled with stuff and a being, is now some walls and some stains that hold pieces of the past that will be covered over like my house was
Covered over and painted new for someone else to come along and fill
Rinse and repeat
Over and over, day in day out until the flat line
The flat line means its over and that’s it
People turn up and park up
They remove your life from the history
They take away your things and they burn them or recycle them or keep them or sell them
Paint over the times and start again
But what gets me in all of this
What really gets me
Is that we are people
We have feelings we have memories
They are in our brains but they die
So where does it all go like a motherboard does it crash
Do we get our own blue screen
Do we have to accept that
The limbs and the vessel go cold and within that we lay untouched
Perfect like all that history people dig up
All that history that reminds us something happened
Even if it was a century ago, it happened
Just a few cupboards and pictures, and sofas, that’s not who we are
We are infinite in this motherboard one that no one can edit or delete
Defo it happened and people met people and they held conversations and they fell in love and they nurtured plants and spoken to babies and watched the new years fall in and struggled to walk and watched their health decline and needed a mobility scooter but didn’t give up
Still pushed it down those steps to get onto the pathway and into town
Into town to buy things to bring back and eat or fix to a wall or give as a gift
These things
All had meaning and even if we don’t know what they were doesn’t make them less
These people are courageous and dignified and doing a job that anyone would find hard
Whether they knew her name or not
And i write this because it matters
It matters that we don’t forget
We don’t forget the people just because the memory is far away
We don’t forget the pictures or the suitcases as they are packed away
We dont forget the first time we met or said hello
Because to me it matters
The parts of our lives matter
We are not just our possessions
We are people.
