Christmas, Crochet, Custard, Cards. Ain El Remmaneh, 1975-2009

I went to my grandmother's house today. Well, the house she used to live in. She doesn't live there anymore. She doesn't live anymore.
Now the house is inhabited by my cousins once a year when they come for the summer. How many lebanese homes share this fate?
I hadn't been there in a couple of years at least. It's so empty, I'm in shock everytime I enter that house. The furniture is still there, some of my uncles and father's old books, books we then read, now collecting dust on an old wooden shelf. No one will be there to read them this time, I think.
Some pictures, a few of teta's necklaces that somehow my aunt managed not to take. The old lamp above her bed, the rocking chair in our room, the round mirror, the wooden piano that now squeaks at every touch, the foot tables.
I've never seen this house with my grandfather in it. He left my grandmother before I was born. I only know this house as hers. Filled with absence, with and without her.
I don't know how my cousins can live here as if nothing happened before. I can't sit on teta's bed without thinking this is where she last breathed, this is where I didn't spend enough time saying goodbye. Telling her she was the strongest greatest woman I knew. That I am who I am because of her and what she taught me. And that even though she's not here anymore and we're all going on as if she never was, she is always in my heart and mind and I wish she could see me now and what she made me become.