hollow spaces

i miss my grandpa and i think that makes me a bad person

I think my first memories live somewhere in a car. The low hum of car tyres and the smear of green trees dissolving through glass, the backseat littered with fast food wrappers and grease-stained boxes. But I mostly remember the laughter. My grandma’s sharp voice, as she sparred with the faceless woman at the drive-thru window. A missing packet of fries, maybe. Ketchup that never made it into the bag. It feels close enough to touch, a memory with all its edges intact.

Most of my childhood has softened with time, as the past tends to do, but those car rides remain vivid. My grandpa’s voice—off-key and unbothered—turning Beatles songs into anthems of his own making. My gran correcting the lyrics, always with that mix of fondness and exasperation. Other days, Elvis would croon through the speakers, and we’d sway in our seatbelts, moving as much as a late ‘90s model Ford would allow. It was a small, constricted dance, but there was something so tender in it.

xsnooze via Pinterest

But then time, in its quiet, merciless way, began to turn everything inside out. I grew sharper, while my grandpa grew softer. I doubt could even name Paul McCartney now, let alone belt out the lyrics to Come Together. Behind his eyes, there’s an emptiness—a vacant, glassy stare, grey like a sea that’s forgotten both its horizon and its depths.

Memories are still made inside a car, but now it’s a grey Fiat 500. The trees blur past as they always have, the tyres hum beneath me, but he’s no longer in the driver’s seat; instead, he’s slumped in a chair in a care home. There’s no soundtrack. And my grandma—well, she’s gone too. The car holds no song now.

And, selfishly, I feel unsettled. The man in the chair doesn’t feel like my grandpa. That’s not the man with the kind eyes who’d slip me a Club bar and beat me at Wii Sports. He isn’t the man that knew every face in town. He’s brittle, his confusion spilling into anger, his frustration pressing against the edges of who he used to be. And it frightens me. I hate myself for feeling that distance, for the way fear has crept in, because I know he’s still the same person. Just older. Just a little farther away.

At some point, my dad told my mum and me to stop visiting. Grandpa wouldn’t recognise us anymore, he said. Two unfamiliar faces would only upset him. There was a twisted, fucked up part of me that was relieved. I was almost grateful to be forgotten. It meant I didn’t have to sit in that sterile room where time had no place.

The care home felt frozen in amber—the faded wallpaper, the muffled hum of daytime quiz shows looping endlessly in the background. Time stopped there, and with it, any sense of forward motion. It terrified me, how everything just lingered, unchanged, day after day. A selfish part of me feared that, with each visit, I was sinking into that same stillness.

But then I thought of the car rides. The way time stilled then too. How he’d pick me up from school every week and drive that long hour home, his life on pause just for me. How he and my gran always had sweets in the glovebox, without fail. How he’d pick up my dad after a night out, or my auntie when the bus didn’t come. Hours spent in a suspended world, rain or shine, holding everything together.

I realised he had been enduring that quiet all his life.

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a short one. thank you for reading, and for subscribing and sticking around.

all my love,

eve xoxo