Echoes in the Living Room

The clock in the living room still ticks like it always did—slow, deliberate, every second marked with a kind of polite finality. That same floral ticking that used to lull me to sleep as a child, back when I’d stretch out on this rug with my colouring books while she hummed something soft in the kitchen. It still ticks. Still keeps time. But somehow, time isn’t happening.

I’m sitting on her settee, legs pulled up, shoes still damp from the morning’s drizzle. The cushions haven’t changed. That same sag where she always sat, the fabric faded more than the rest. She always said the living room was “lived in.” I didn’t understand that phrase until now, until the living has stopped.

The others are in the kitchen, pretending to eat. Whispering. Forks barely clinking. Someone’s trying not to cry too loudly. I can’t go in there. I can’t listen to them say the things you’re supposed to say when someone dies. She lived a good life. She’s at peace now. She’d want us to celebrate, not mourn. As if grief is some kind of party trick.

The room is silent in its own way—no voices, but full of ghosts. Not actual ones. Just… shapes. Presences. Her scent still woven into the upholstery: lavender, maybe rosewater, and something warmly metallic—probably her hairpins, the ones she boiled for some reason. The lace doilies on the side tables are perfectly straight. No one’s touched them. That feels important. Like the room’s holding its breath with me.

I keep glancing at the doorway, half-expecting her to shuffle through it, squinting, holding her tea with both hands. She’d make a soft noise of greeting, like she always did when she entered a room. Not a word, just a hum. A living thing. I can almost hear it. Almost. But then I remember that we packed away her slippers this morning. They were still warm when I picked them up.

The funeral car is late. Or maybe early. Or maybe I’m the one out of time. The way grief folds reality is strange. Everyone else seems to be moving on a different track, like I’ve slipped through to a slower, quieter reel of film. A loop where she still exists in the way a smell does—fleeting, hard to prove, impossible to forget.

My eyes drift to the old telly, the one with the cracked screen she never replaced. We watched Wuthering Heights there—her favourite version, the black-and-white one with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. I remember how she’d clutch the armrest when Heathcliff’s rage boiled over, how she’d softly whisper lines as if speaking them aloud made the story come alive between us. She always insisted on watching it twice when I visited, insisting I see the world through her eyes, through that storm of love and heartbreak she loved so much.

I find myself staring at the old cabinet in the corner. The one she wouldn’t let anyone touch. Inside: pressed flowers, matchbooks from places she never went, and a figurine of a girl holding a basket. She once told me it looked like her, even though it didn’t. Not really. But today, I can’t stop staring at it and thinking—maybe it does. Maybe I never really saw her.

Maybe she was always a little imaginary. Built up from stories she told, gaps filled in by my own wonder. She told me once that when people die, they don’t disappear—they dissolve into the things they loved. I didn’t get it then. But now, sitting in the middle of this carefully arranged emptiness, I think maybe that’s what happened.

She’s in the drawer that sticks when you open it. In the crack in the ceiling that she said looked like a rabbit. In the blanket folded over the chair—crooked, on purpose. She always left things just a little undone, said it made a home feel alive.

And now this one doesn’t.

But somehow, she’s still here.

Just enough to make it feel like she never was.

“Are you ready to go?”

I think that’s Mum, but I feel too numb to put a face to that voice. I heaved a sigh.

No, I wanted to say, but a lie slipped from my lips.

“Yes.”