Inheritance of Empty Benches

A Quiet Goodbye to the Places That Held Me

It’s the last day of college tomorrow. We had our farewell yesterday. Between all the goodbyes, I have been thinking a lot about spaces—how they hold us, witness us, and change with us. As college comes to an end, it isn’t just people or routines I find myself saying goodbye to—it’s the spaces. The corners, the corridors, the benches, the staircases that quietly carried versions of me I’ll never be again.

Some of these spaces hold a strange kind of duality.
A classroom where I once stood tall after acing a presentation- only to later sit in the same room, shattered by a conversation that changed me in ways I’m still learning to name.
A bench in front of the canteen where I cried quietly after a hard day- only to laugh there until my stomach hurt with friends who turned that place into something softer, something safe.

There’s a spot in front of Hideaway, a small food corner near our college, our literal “hideaway”—inside, spent numerous days escaping to have a small cup of coffee and a mere 10 metres ahead, a small, ordinary patch that turned into a sacred pause between things. I’ve stood there countless times, caught in conversations with people who knew different sides of me. It leads into the main road, where lives diverge—some rushing to the metro, others hopping into autos, and people like me, walking slowly in a direction that feels like no one else’s.

That space held long goodbyes we never wanted to end.
It’s where I stood, just one step away from separating, suspended in that delicate moment of not quite yet.

Where we shared the strange, inexplicable dreams we had the night before, our lives so deeply intertwined that they manifested into a made-up, imaginary reality of our own beyond the real world we shared. And in the same space, other dreams quietly shattered with the weight of disappointing news.
How do you say goodbye to that space?

I’ll remember laughing uncontrollably in the lab, drawing curious stares from faculty and students alike—always brushing it off, saying it was just something in the AC air.
And somehow, in that very same lab, in that cold AC air, we later found ourselves sitting quietly, tears slipping down our cheeks, mourning the inevitability of parting ways.

There’s another corner etched in memory—the mini canteen, where I used to grab a chilled hazelnut Smoodh before it vanished with the supplier switch in my final semester. Another quiet, unexpected goodbye.
It was the same space where we once scribbled out our radio jingle: spontaneous, chaotic, brimming with laughter and that rare, absurdly perfect synergy.
And it was here, too, where I once sat with swollen eyes, holding the weight of my nani’s passing, moments before I had to pull myself together and face an examiner for my final viva.

These spaces are chameleons—shifting hues with our moods.
Even the gloomiest days are tinted with lilac skies in memory, softened by glee that somehow lingers.

There was one specific tree bench I once watched from a distance, where others practised dances and lived moments I only observed. I would pass by quietly, earphones in, eyes on the ground. But I was watching. Always watching.
Watching people laugh effortlessly, share food and tease each other.

It felt like I was on the outside of something sacred. Even if I was there, it wasn’t quite the same.
And for a while, I convinced myself that was enough, to just be a spectator.

But spaces have a way of waiting.
They don’t rush you.
They observe you too, until you’re ready.

One day, not too long ago, maybe just a month back, I found myself there, without even realising it. I had become the very person I used to watch from afar: laughing, part of a rehearsal, creating memories of my own.

These shared spaces feel almost like inheritance, passed down from batch to batch like a generational gift. And yet, just as you begin to make them your own, you're asked to leave them behind. That grief of departing from a space you've only just begun to understand feels like a generational curse.

These spaces didn’t just exist around me- they held me, cradled the quiet parts of me I wasn’t ready to share. In a way, they were aspirations. I had just truly arrived—after three long years of being a silent observer. And in the end, I found myself doing exactly what I had once only watched others do. It felt like an odd sort of triumph.

My PG- a second home. The first time I ever shared a space with someone else. The quiet walks under the streetlights to the Kirana shop. Sitting with the cats in Neem Park, feeling like the world had slowed just for a moment as I stroked their necks. The phone calls I had, pacing around that oval cement bench surrounding the tree, waiting to tell the punch line of my story. The late-night project submissions, hunched over my desk on my bed in silence sitting together racing against time itself.

And now, someone else will inhabit that same room, those same walls that once held our 2 a.m. conversations over chai, laughter echoing softly in the silence of the night. Sleep in the same bed. Stare at the same wall that once heard my late-night confessions.

Nothing is physically ending.
The buildings will remain. The doors will stay open.
But the emotional architecture is crumbling.

New faces will sit in the chairs I once did. New footsteps will echo in the hallways.
And yet, the version of college I knew will quietly vanish, because it only existed through the lens of my experience.

Some spaces evolved with me.
They were once shared with people I no longer speak to, memories now carrying the weight of silence. And yet, I returned to them, slowly reclaiming them with new people, new stories, new laughter.
In some rooms, I have lived entire lives.

Even in my first week here, I sensed it, these walls had already seen so much.
Someone had cried here before me. Laughed until their stomach hurt.
Sat in silence, unsure of where they were headed—and still found their way.

The scratched desks, the faded doodles, the chair that says “kiss my ass”, they gave me a strange kind of comfort.
Proof that this place had been alive before I arrived.
That I wasn’t the first to belong, and I won’t be the last to leave.

And now, as I prepare to leave, it feels like I am fading too—or maybe I’m the one slowly being erased from them.
There’s also a strange jealousy, knowing someone else will soon take over, never knowing what it once held.
If the person now sitting where I once sat can feel the layers beneath their moment.

It’s strange how a place can look exactly the same and still feel entirely unfamiliar.
Because we don’t just occupy space—we shape it.
We breathe meaning into the mundane.
And when we leave, a version of that place leaves with us.

“Don’t we all maintain an inventory of obituaries in our hearts? At least I do, for the many people, places and things that I love—for what was, for what could have been. I think an obituary becomes valid only from the time you acknowledge that a loss is a loss.” - An Inventory of Obituaries

So maybe this is my quiet goodbye.
An obituary for the spaces that held me when I didn’t know I needed holding.
For the walls that bore witness to the becoming of me, before they become someone else’s to love.