The Room That Moves With Us
Fifteen years married, seventeen since we met.
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The Room That Moves With Us
Seven years ago, a boy died at a year and a half old. A scan in his mother's third trimester had already told both parents he would not live past two. They carried him to term anyway. His father had been clear about it from the beginning: two days, two months or two years, he wanted the child. The year and a half the boy lived, the family spent in and out of hospital.
Since then they have moved twice. Both times, before anything else was unpacked, the father rebuilt his son's bedroom exactly as it was — the small bed, the toys, the nightstand, the shoes still dirty and still standing where they fell. The only thing in that room that has changed is the box of ashes now sitting on the nightstand. The mother wrote about it in That's not a room, that's a Tomb, and what she wrote is not what the title sounds like. She is happy he does it.
"The Room That Moves With Us" is the slow piano ballad that came out of that post. One voice and a piano carry the first verse: a table lamp, a needle and thread, a man sewing bibs for a son who had not been born yet, while the television played on. Strings and light percussion arrive with the first chorus and step back again; the final chorus opens wide, and then the piano is left alone with it.
The chorus is the fact the song cannot get over:
Every house we move to, you build his room again.
What the song will not do is hand her a verdict. She has said the word herself — a tomb, not a room — and then she stood in the doorway and left it exactly as it was. Her grief has no furniture in it. It plays behind her eyes, the same night over and over, while her husband lights three incense sticks beside the ashes every morning and comes apart over a spoonful of vanilla pudding.
Play it on a night when two people in one house are grieving in opposite directions and neither of them can say whose way is right. Or play it alone, in a house where you have quietly kept something exactly where it was.
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