There’s something about being alone in an empty warehouse after it was full for so long. 

The old worn walls are no longer covered by hooks with old jackets hanging from them in a permanent retirement after years of service. The handmade workbench is missing its friends and coworkers that used to be scattered every which way before someone needed their assistance. The building’s corners are now absent of tall industrial shelves crammed with yesterday’s memories— keepsakes from glory days. What used to feel like a regular, comfortably crammed storage room is now a vast concrete box. It’s cold without warm reminiscence. 

Loneliness is echoed in footsteps on dusty concrete floors. The emptiness inside the four walls is stunning in a way that makes heads fuzzy with worry and gravity seems to be a greater force when realizing all that has been moved to better places. 

Losing objects that hold so many memories causes a heartache so striking and crippling that shadows of regret start to seep in because losing them feels like losing every scrap of remembrance along with them. Will those memories ever be remembered again now that their evocative devices are never to be felt or recognized again? 

Initially, fierce jealousy approaches. It’s a burning beast: knowing that a new person gets something dear and sentimental, but doesn’t realize or appreciate the object in that way. But, in the end, it isn’t losing the object that causes the monster to come out, it’s losing the accompanied memory that triggers her to protect the object with such severity.

The object itself doesn’t have value without the memory, so there can be a reassuring notion that the memory will indeed live forever, if it’s worth remembering.

Whether the building be used as empty space forever or be filled to the brim with everything one could imagine, the warehouse will be commemorated for housing so much love and time for so long.  Its old boxes full of photo albums are relocated to computer desktops and sleep screens for people to see every day. Childhood toys are donated to the next generation of memories. Jackets are given to those who have none. Old things are taken in by new people who create new uses and new memories with them. And the world still turns. And the empty warehouse sits alone, content in knowing it has given so much.