In an immediate reflex of revulsion I pull back my hand. My eyes examine my shaky palm, making sure no flies have stuck themselves onto my skin or found cover in-between the folds of where the skin meets the fingernail. I calm myself down and slowly my disgust makes way for, or rather changes its shape into a new feeling, angry contempt. I am not quite sure if my contempt was maybe there from the beginning, imperceptible to me because so vehemently obscured, eclipsed by a cover-up feeling called disgust which carries, I assume, a less morally objectionable undertone, since it seems so primal a feeling, making me feel less guilty of casting judgement onto a person; disgust is physical and visceral and can be directed at non-living objects just as much as people can be its target, whereas contempt seems to be a feeling that can only compose itself from long enough exposure to society and is always directed towards its members and when feeling it, one carries a slight suspicion that it is a bad feeling to feel, a corruption of this same society, disarming the one affected by the emotion by exposing their own role in the depravity. In that case, it wasn’t that disgust first had to leave my system before contempt could take center stage, the latter actually revealed itself just in that moment when the former was at its most intense, in an instant of such agitation that all learned restraint, all guard was lifted in a careless fracture of a second, like a nervous stagehand lifting the wrong curtain at the wrong time because the play they view from the side excites such exhilaration in them, making their body tremble and hands shake, that it triggers their reflex to pull the rope, prematurely revealing the stage set of the finale.

 

To escape my temporary paralysis of thought, a contemplative shutdown, I decide to proceed with a different room and come back to this situation later. Now I stand in the daughter’s former room who moved out a few years ago. By the looks of it, it is nowadays also used as a painting studio, given the awkwardly placed easel in the middle of the room between the daughter’s bed and shelves, and the cheap acrylic paint tubes scattered on her former desk. I get the impression that the painting gear is not hers and has been added by someone else, a person who loves and misses her, since all of her objects stand awkwardly in the way of the easel. If these were her canvases, she would have moved some of her furniture to the wall to make more space. But whoever decided that they want to paint in this room did it with anxious deference not to move any object that used to belong to the daughter, as if rearranging a chair by only a centimeter would throw off this person’s secret rhyme of movement and careful composition of objects. In grief, objects harden into intention. Missing lifts constellations into arrangements and longing elevates them into meaning. We are afraid to lose even more evidence of them, who probably could have not been any more careless about the way they left behind the furniture in the places that they did, because our own decisions will never inspire the same symbolism that they transport to others, so her parents may have felt the urge to turn their child’s room into a museum, a church or a resting place. Maybe afraid to wake up and further upset the sleeping spirit thought to reside in this room, after it has already been irritated by the introduction of the easel's foreign logic, it seems as though not much painting had been done by her parents since their first act of vandalism. Like a visitor in a temple built by believers of a different faith, I begin to wonder how to even go about cleaning a room like this. Clearly, it cannot be handled with the same approach, the same goal of pleasant but not sterile cleanliness I would follow while taking care of the other rooms. This is not a space in use but a sight of preservation and remembrance. Is the dust on the desk a tribute to the daughter’s absence or even her own deliberation? Does it cause her parents pain to see it pile up or do I cause them more pain if I swipe over the surface in order to remove it, an attempt of blasphemous exhumation? Is the fluffy gray layer perhaps even a necessary reminder for them that indeed life is always changing? Dare I pick up the little trinkets on the shelf to wet clean the boards? What if I put them back in the wrong angle, throwing off the entire iconography? Actually, the room is full of little figures, Tamagotchis, Sylvanian Families rabbits, Nintendo amiibos and most commanding a Stitch from Lilo and Stitch Pride-themed rainbow edition Funkopop, with his left ear red, like the horn of a devil, the gradient then turning from orange into an unsettling yellow and green on his face, making me worry Stitch will throw up, only to morph into blue on his body and a hint of purple when it reaches the corner of his butt, coming the closest to Stitch’s original fur color. The mouth stretching from one ear to another, he reveals his sharp teeth made out of vinyl. Two black eyes without irises, made of the same material as the rest of his body with a slightly shinier, yet still dominantly matte surface, could not appear less like holes despite their color and shape, but rather accentuate their own utter flatness and lack of depth as Stitch stares deep into me, gaining direct access to my mind and nervous system, as the rainbow colors start appearing like a swirl around the black dot in its center, hypnotizing me.

 

Slowly, I am able to avert my gaze from him and continue to look around me, still feeling animated by his presence. I see the way the room teems with inhabitants that fill it with life, but they are not alone in doing so. Looking at the other objects, I notice that almost every object features a face. The forgotten coffee cup sticks out its tongue at me and a Sklum reproduction of the Kartell tube container winks at the gummy bear lamp wearing a clown’s hat. I don’t remember much of the rest of my shift, only that the Stitch Funkpop sent me into a frenzy of vigorous cleaning that felt instructed, almost violent, making me clean every hidden corner in the apartment, even ripping off the fly party that previously made me question the moral timing of emotions, as if its soulless eyes drafted unknown energies from inside myself. The little demon’s appearance imparted me both the clarity and energy to finish my task at hand. Eventually, I recall saying goodbye and quickly leaving to catch my bus. It is the season when winter turns into spring, where they coexist and play a game of hide and seek, the feathers of spring hidden underneath the coat of winter. While my feet feel cold, my ears are burning hot. My nose and mouth started to tickle — in the way they sometimes do when one is in love — maybe because of the sun, or because something in that room had chosen me.