Empty Spaces

My sister moved out of my house yesterday. She had been my roommate here since I bought the place 9 years ago, so suffice it to say she had a lot of stuff here and with that stuff gone, I now have empty spaces in my house.

I have a bedroom and a den that now have little to no furniture. My kitchen seems a whole lot bigger after she took the table and chairs that were there. (I still have a table and chairs in the dining room area. The kitchen set was perfect for the apartment she’s moving into, so I gave them to her.) One of the TV stands no longer has a TV and a few other notable things are no longer here, like the tall cat tower that resided by the stairs.

All that new space brings up different things for me. New possibilities, new energy, a fresh start, new directions, but there is also something immediately disconcerting about creating that space. What will fill it?

But something will. I’ve often had the experience in my life of needing to move something out of the way first before something new can enter. It would be nice if we could just go from one thing right to another, so that there were no empty spaces. But, I find that’s often not the way it goes.

Then there’s the anxiety that maybe nothing will fill those spaces. That they’ll be empty forever? Not likely. Empty space attracts things that want to fill it. But first comes that feeling of uncertainty that none of us like all that much.

Though the truth is that uncertainty could just as easily bring us something pleasant as unpleasant. We just tend to focus in on fears of the unpleasant!

I think about other empty spaces that sometimes make me uncomfortable–a blank page/screen, the space left when a relationship ends, a new job or career. But there is something to be created there. Something new. How many times have I opened up a new document on my laptop only to have a finished story there sometime in the near future? A lot!

And these empty spaces I now have in my house are no different. Something will fill them. Something of my creation. New stories. I’m excited to see what they will be.

Amanda Linehan is the author of North, about a young woman on the run from her past, the law and an old adversary out to get her. Her newest release is Bored To Death: A Vampire Thriller, about a 300-year-old vampire trying to restore the balance between life and death. She has published five novels.