Grandma.

It's still wet and gloomy outside, so I decided to post something from the archive. There are places that you know you'll never go back to again, sometimes by will, sometimes by chance, but my grandma's apartment in the Moscow suburbs is one of them. My grandma passed away almost three years ago and I have visited her old apartment only once since then. It's a strange feeling to visit someone's home after they haven't lived there for a while. It has all the same furniture, same books, same square footage, but at the same time everything is missing. I don't want to get all hippie here, but it seems that every person has an essence about them that they take with them wherever they go. When the person is gone no matter how similar you keep the place to when he or she was alive, that essence is gone. There are a few things in that apartment that remind me of the past: a bookshelf that was a tall apartment building in my imagination when I was little, strange dangly light switches, one of which was red, and many other things. A couple of days ago I remembered how I would have daytime naps when I was a kid and fall asleep under an orange blanket to the murmur of my mom's and grandma's voices in the other room. I'd look at the sun shining through the curtain in the room and feel safe, happy and sleepy.