In the empty house, hidden behind a mass of mangled bushes, there was a life. A life that existed parallel to mine. Two stones on a beach, aligned in our own spaces. Time and tide moved through us, around us, but we were always there.

That was until just a short week ago, they both died, one expected, one sudden. Speculation on the second seemed ungracious. After all, a life together, mingled and mixed, leaves behind what? An empty space? A memory?

I didn’t know them, not well anyway, and at times I could have supposed them unfriendly and avoided eye contact as we passed each other, mutually agreeing not to acknowledge the other.

Yet the empty space they leave behind is palpable. The breath catches as the space that was once their life is dismantled. The mangled bushes and trees cut to let the light in where once souls had occupied four walls. Their life in a box with windows and a door now left ajar, as if they had just left for the day.

I wondered about their cats and the dog.

He walked the dog every day along the same route. The young dog grew old, the man looked the same. Then there was a new dog, already old, like the man. They too walked the same route, yet slower, uneven in pace and always alone. Just him and his dog.

The couple never walked together.

Morning was her time. She stood at the bus stop, bag over her shoulder, not ageing like the man. Later, on the bus home, she would push her bag filled with shopping over her arm and onto her left shoulder. Her body tilted to the right to balance the weight. She moved at a steady pace towards her house.

I’d often thought, catching a glimpse through the gate, why leave the flowerpots tipped over? The cats lazed along the concrete driveway, speckled with shafts of light trying their best to penetrate the leaves. She moved deftly around the obstacles, bag in tow, belying her apparent age.

And yet I miss them, and I didn’t know them. Like I never knew the souls that lived in the now-derelict cottages dotted across the countryside. The ones we pass as we live our lives, moving from place to place, busy walking or talking, thinking, being, wanting, and generally deluding ourselves that we won’t end up there: an empty space left behind where once someone lived.

Perhaps that is the crux of my sadness: are we all spaces that are viewed from the outside? Lived-in spaces where we barricade ourselves away from the outside world and do our thing, where we dream a life, and often those dreams are unfulfilled.

Or maybe those unfulfilled dreams are my unfulfilled thoughts projected onto the other.

Something I will never know. I never stopped to chat or smile. I decided on who they were. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the empty space I see is not their life, not their emptiness, but our disconnect through judgment about the known and unknown.

Like the stones on the beach, we co-exist because we are both here. But one day, a fierce storm will blow in and take away one of the stones, leaving behind a potent, palpable, empty space. An empty space that we, too, are destined to leave behind.

Once there was a constant in my life that disappeared and left a void, even one as inconsequentially consequential as a neighbour I never really knew.