How the House Remembers

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

The house wore its silence thick—
a woolen cloak after rain,
settling into the threads of curtains,
seeping through the slats of shutters.

He stood in the living room.
Her chair, angled toward the window,
still bore the weight of her absence:
an imprint faint as the memory
of hands folding into prayer.

The dogs' corner smelled
of fur and sleep—
a shadow of warmth where
their blankets lay.
He traced the indentation
of paws on the wooden floor,
the spaces they left behind
too vast to fill.

The cats once prowled these walls,
their tails curling around table legs.
Now the air hung still—
a whisker, caught in sunlight,
a ghost of movement that vanished
before he could reach it.

Loss sat with him,
its weight pressing into
his ribcage, its breath
a draft that never ceased.

He touched the walls,
as if pressing his palms
against a mirror:
what once reflected him,
now, only absence.

The echoes came
in fragments:
the faint lavender
of her lotion in the bathroom,
a chew toy hidden under the couch—
its rubber worn to threadbare teeth.
Even the sun refused permanence,
its rays slanting through the window
like a visitation, brief and fading.

Grief worked its way into the house’s marrow,
pushing against the rafters,
seeping through the pipes.
He tried to live inside it.

They said:
move forward.
They said:
grief softens,
folds into the body,
becomes less a stone
and more a ripple.

But forward meant
leaving them behind:
the recipe book inked
with her steady hand;
his oldest dog’s nose
pressed against his knee;
the scratch of claws
on his bedroom door—
a chorus calling him back
to the life he lost.

He picked up their remains.
He set the leashes on a shelf.
Folded their absence
into something he could carry—
a museum built
of unspoken things.

At night,
he swore he saw them:
her humming in the rocking chair,
the dogs chasing stars
across the yard,
the cats stalking shadows
under the moon.

He knew these visions
weren’t real,
but the flicker of them—
a lit match against his chest—
was enough.

Grief, it seemed,
was both severance
and tethering:
one hand letting go,
the other gripping tight
to the edges of memory.

In the end,
he lived between the two:
the recipe book closed,
but kept;
the photo of the dogs
fading on the fridge;
the cat’s paw print
on his desk,
still sharp enough to cut.

He let grief settle,
its bones becoming part of his own.
And in that place,
where absence met permanence,
he found something—
a pulse, faint but steady,
a love that lived
even in the silence.