Today I returned to an abandoned house I have visited before.

Part of it has collapsed now.

The roof has fallen in. The walls are beginning to follow.

Nature is moving slowly through the rooms.

The furniture remains. Clothes still hang where they were left.

Small traces of people who once lived there.

Last year, I noticed a small box of pins resting on a windowsill.

It was such an ordinary thing.

I do not know why I remembered it.

But today it was gone.

The room was still there. The window was still there.

Only the box was missing.

And I felt a surprising sense of loss.

There was broken porcelain on the floor. Collapsed walls. Signs of decay everywhere.

Yet it was the missing box that stayed with me.

I stood there for a while, trying to understand it.

I could not.

Perhaps it was never really about the box.

Perhaps it was the person behind it.

Someone I will never know.

The owner of those pins had slowly become an idea in my mind.

Not a real person. Not even a story.

Just a possibility.

I often find myself drawn to things in this way.

A trace. A fragment. Something incomplete.

Not because I want answers.

But because something remains open.

The small box of pins is gone now.

Yet the questions remain.

And perhaps that is what I was attached to all along.

Jeanette