The Architecture of Echoes

The blue velvet coat my father wore to every winter funeral is gone, donated to a charity shop I will never visit. It is not the fabric I miss, but the specific weight of it—the way it held the scent of cedar and old tobacco, a ghost of a man who no longer occupies the rooms of my childhood. We spend our lives building structures to house our presence, stacking stone and steel as if to prove we were here, as if height could somehow anchor us against the inevitable tide of forgetting. Yet, when the lights flicker on in the tall, glass monoliths of a city, they do not look like homes. They look like monuments to the people who are not inside them. We build these towering, glowing skeletons to reach for a sky that does not know our names. If we were to vanish tomorrow, would the city feel the sudden, hollow ache of our absence, or would it simply continue to glow, indifferent to the space we once filled?

Siew Bee Lim has taken this beautiful image titled Buildings of UOB Plaza and Six Battery Road. The way the light clings to these structures reminds me that even in the busiest places, there is a quiet, lingering ghost of human intention. Does the city feel emptier to you when the lights are this bright?