The house is empty. You hear the moving van taking the last bits of memories away, and then it fades away. Everything now is just as it was in the beginning, stripped of pretensions and presumptions. It is its own essence.

You sit in the room where you first proclaimed your love to her. She said yes to you back then. There were two cushions back then with the other leftovers you found at garage sales. There were hand-me-downs from friends and families who shared in the vision that was you. There it was: the beginning. She laughed and fell in your arms, sinking with you into your cushion like she was folded into you, forever. You try not to see it now, and the room in its silence says, so be it. The memory fades.

Too much happened, and you don’t want to see any of it. When all of it can just be removed in one fell swoop, what is it that you accomplished?

The room in its bareness, now this is what you can handle. Open spaces with no definitions but what you make of them. This is where everything begins, after the ending takes everything away.

You sit there, waiting for the lesson of emptiness to give you the wisdom of the ages. The room is indifferent. You are an inconvenience to it, writing your own stories into it. No matter how much you empty the vessel, your story pollutes its purity. You write upon the room’s essence with your personal agenda. Just like you did before with her: or so she said, to you.

You feel stripped inside. It doesn’t help that everything that you called your life is not here. You are left with you, the shell of this life. Even this place rejects you, telling you your time here is limited. It’s already been taken care of: in two weeks, a new couple will move in here to replace you.

You’ve met them. They’re nice people. You wished them well at first glance. They were in this room, and they planned where their flat screen TV was going to go. You look now at the place they pointed out. In your life with her, that’s where her oil paintings went: there had been a rainbow there, soon to be replaced by plasma.

You watched the new couple, especially him. You can’t help but see him sitting where you are now, in some undisclosed future, with nothing left but an empty room. It was like, maybe your bad dreams could be halved if someone else suffered in them.

So much for zen. All you are doing is clutching to something that is gone, while rationalizing that you are doing something magnanimous with lofty platitudes. This is reality: she dumped you. She hates you. She never wants to see you again. And the room doesn’t care about your memories. You get up, slam the door, leave the room behind you. So much for wisdom.

The room is empty now.