Loss doesn’t always look like change. Sometimes, it looks like everything staying exactly as it was. It’s a coat still hanging by the door in June. It’s a second coffee cup, rinsed and returned to its place, but never used. It’s a voicemail that’s been saved, but never played. It’s the chair no one dares to move. It’s the porch light left on long after the habit should have faded. It’s a calendar still turned to the month they left. It’s the door that no longer gets locked—because no one is expected anymore.
“The House Didn’t Notice” offers a quiet reflection on what is often overlooked and forgotten. It rests in the spaces that remain untouched, the words left unspoken, and the tensions that have yet to find their release.
The House Didn’t Notice
(A poem by Kerry Ann Wiley)
What passed for morning
was colorless wind.
No song came through—
just the weight
of once.
Walls remembered laughter
but held only dust.
The table stayed set,
but the hands never touched.
No names were spoken.
No doors were locked.
Only a leaving
that didn’t need steps.
The sky
did not open.
The sky
did not fall.
It stood still,
watching nothing at all.
The flame curled inward.
The sea turned its face.
No place was waiting.
No grace remained.
No ending.
Just the rhythm
of staying the same.
The poem begins with a denial of renewal. Morning arrives drained of color, stripped of the brightness and sound that might have marked the promise of a new day.” “No song came through— / just the weight / of once.” The air is thick with what used to matter.
Even wind—the usual symbol of movement—is dulled. This isn’t a beginning. It’s a hollow continuation.
The lines settle into something quieter, touching on the emptiness left behind. “Walls remembered laughter / but held only dust.” Memory becomes ambient, clinging faintly to structures that no longer contain life. The table remains set, its form untouched, but the hands it waited for never returned. It’s like a clock still ticking in an abandoned room—time moving forward, but with no one left to meet it.
By the third stanza, motion itself is erased. “Only a leaving / that didn’t need steps.” There is no clear departure, no defined point of exit. What remains is not a trace but an absence, and the doors stay unlocked—not from trust or welcome—but because there is no longer any reason to protect what no one will ever return for.
Then the sky enters—not to witness, not to respond—but to remain unaffected. “The sky / did not open. / The sky / did not fall.”
The passage speaks to a deep sense of loneliness and emotional emptiness. The sky appears simply as something distant and untouched. It isn’t seeing. It just is. This silence and stillness echo the emptiness felt inside, as if the outside world reflects the same kind of numbness. Nothing changes. Nothing responds. The world remains cold and indifferent, just like the sky above.
Even the elements withdraw. “The flame curled inward. / The sea turned its face.” These are not signs of rage or sorrow. What unfolds here is a quiet subversion of the expected behavior of the natural elements—fire and water—when influenced by emotion.
Instead of rising in a dramatic display, the flame curls inward and the sea turns its face in a gesture of retreat. These are not outbursts of fury or grief, but restrained, almost reverent responses—an emotional withdrawal expressed through stillness rather than force.
It’s as though even these primal forces are overcome, not by a lack of feeling, but by emotion so profound it defies outward expression. Instead of flaring or crashing in dramatic display, the fire contracts and the ocean turns away. The intensity remains, but it manifests not through motion, but through stillness and retreat. Here, emotion pulls back, heavy with meaning.
The final lines resist closure, offering instead a purposeful absence of resolution. “No place was waiting. / No grace remained. / No ending.” These stark phrases convey neither conclusion nor transformation, withholding any sense of progression or relief. Rather than moving forward, the piece loops back on itself, returning to “the rhythm / of staying the same.”
In this repetition, meaning unfolds through what is left behind. It lingers in the hollow resonance, in the stillness that echoes softly through familiar spaces. It lives in the quiet vacancy where movement once stirred and emotion once took shape.
In the end, “The House Didn’t Notice” captures a grief so quiet it hides in the repetition of everyday rituals—the flick of a light switch, the untouched place setting, the door that stays ajar. The silence isn’t empty. It holds the residue of what once was, suspended.
The stillness speaks. The elements pull back, the sky holds its breath, and the house remains. The power lies not in what grief changes, but in what it leaves the same. In that sameness, the weight of absence quietly takes root.
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