My Soul Upstairs

My soul is an empty room upstairs, reached by a narrow stair I climb in thought, where nothing waits for me except the uneasy knowledge that I have been there before, although I cannot remember entering, leaving, or belonging to the place.

There is a ceiling with old marks beneath it, a wall that has kept its pale color through years of neglect, and a small square of daylight that changes its position as the day passes, while I remain seated in my own mind, watching the room become something I cannot explain.

I have imagined furnishing it many times, giving it books, a chair, some reason for the person who might live there, yet each attempt feels like an intrusion, since the room seems to know that whatever I bring upstairs will eventually become another thing I must leave behind.

So I keep returning with nothing, which may be the closest thing I have to a possession, and I sit among the spaces where a life could have been, considering how peculiar it is that a person can carry an entire house inside himself and still have one room where nobody lives.

I think that room is the truest part of me, because everything else has been occupied by duties, conversations, faces, habits, and the small arrangements required for passing through the world, while upstairs there remains a place untouched by all of it, waiting for nothing and asking nothing, which makes it more mine than anything I have ever owned.

When I think of death, I think less of leaving this life than of finally opening that upstairs door and discovering that the emptiness I feared was never waiting to be filled, since it had been waiting for me to understand that emptiness can also be a form of existence.