Our House: A Spacetime of the Soul

I feel a profound shift within me, as if my psyche is undergoing a deep reshaping. I no longer fully belong to who I was, nor do I have a clear image of who I will become. Old ties are quietly unraveling—familiar thoughts, emotions, and traits are losing their weight without noise. This unfolds in a transitional inner space, where no ground is firm, and no sky is final. It is a state of subtle disintegration, not toward loss, but toward creation.

My soul is preparing for a new birth, whispering that what is happening is an extension of deep transformations that have been simmering in the depths, now rising to the surface in strange synchronicity with the changes in the world around me. It’s as if they share a single map of transformation, drawn by an unseen force on the canvas of both heart and reality.

Recently, my family moved to a new home, and I didn’t feel much sympathy for the idea of leaving the old one. I thought I had detached from it since my marriage. But the truth is, a part of me lingered there without my knowing, and I only realized this when I saw the harsh images of the house that held my childhood—its walls demolished, its features scattered. Only then did dormant emotions awaken. It was as if the rubble of the walls stirred another kind of rubble in my heart. The windows through which I once gazed at the neighborhood became voids open to nothingness, and the walls that carried our laughter turned into silent ruins. I felt as though the stones that fell were falling from my memory too, leaving within me a void larger than I had imagined.

The house was not merely a structure but a stage of life—our laughter, our quarrels, our embraces, my mother in the kitchen preparing the purslane stew I loved, the aroma of Sudanese coffee my father brewed after every sunset. So many details formed a familiar rhythm that granted us a sense of stability and belonging.

Despite my departure from the house years ago, it remained in harmony with my inner self. When it was demolished, along with the entire neighborhood, something tore in the fabric of my being, its echo reverberating in my depths. It shook me to my roots, urging me to reconsider how our existence is shaped and intertwined with time and place.

If we imagine that spacetime bends not only to physical mass but also to emotional weight, then this demolition, though seemingly trivial to the cosmos, left a profound mark on the fabric of our consciousness. It’s as if memory itself bends and fractures with the walls, reminding us that we do not merely inhabit places—they seep into us, carving out their own timeless space within.

When the bulldozer came, it didn’t just destroy the house; it compressed that emotional mass into a point of infinite density, transforming through its collapse into a black hole in the fabric of our own time and space. I don’t mean spacetime as a physical reality, but what we might call “emotional spacetime”—that inner realm where our feelings wrap around cherished places and moments, where time and space converge under the weight of emotion. The house was not just walls and a roof but an emotional spacetime holding intimate moments and memories of longing. When it crumbled, that emotional mass collapsed into a point of immense density, like the birth of a black hole that swallowed the entire city. It tore apart the familiar order, disrupting the rhythm of our existence, leaving us staggering between nostalgia and astonishment, searching for our familiar selves in this new world.

Yet, in the heart of that black hole, in the deepest moments of darkness and void, a light emerged. While the walls fell outside, another world was being built within—a world untouched by bulldozers, untouched by time. There, memory and dreams reconstruct the house’s foundations anew. We rearrange the shattered rooms and paint the old scenes with new colors, as if the subconscious insists the house hasn’t died but has moved elsewhere—to a land of dreams where no bulldozer can reach, existing as an indelible emotional truth.

And so, the collapse was not an end but an opening to a new beginning, a chance to rediscover myself—not through what I’ve lost, but through what I might become. The house is not merely walls we return to; it is an emotional cosmos that renews and expands as our hearts do, an inner light that dispels the loneliness of estrangement. It is an eternal home, unbound by maps or governed by walls, shaped by our heartbeats and the spark of love that gives existence meaning.

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