Buildings may technically be not-living entities, but are they really? When your enter a space it often pushes you into a different realm and levies a certain mood on you. Like when you enter a library you automatically go silent. Time appears to move slower. Enter a hospital and the smell of surgical spirit overpowers your senses. You sit in the lobby for a few minutes and you find yourself already internalising the habit of waiting. Airports, I feel, are a mix of anxious urgency and expensive coffee.

 

The arrivals and departures give the place a transient energy. Meanwhile, markets smell of pungent, stale cartons. Take a deep breath and you’ll feel dust in that unreachable spot between your nose and throat. In a mall, you walk into buy a pair of socks and leave four hours later with three bags in your hands (your decision is physically hurting you now), struggling to decide if you are actually financially stable and secretly hating yourself for not going to that local shop down the street.

 

Staying at a luxury hotel can make one feel like a king/queen. It makes you feel like an absolute monarch and while leaving, you find yourself eyeing that luxury soap and contemplating whether or not to abuse your absolute powers by sneaking it into your luggage. Then there are old apartments. Which trap seasons and years. A room can feel rainy in the scorching summer heat and a hallway can remind you of 2016. Classrooms make you dread that the next question might be for you, but that intense dread flips into fun when the bell for the lunch break rings. And elevators! They just exist to trigger social awkwardness.

 

You stare at the ceiling, the floor, the numbers. Anywhere but the person standing two inches away, avoiding a direct look as if they are Medusa and an eye contact might turn you into stone. I think walls remember things. Rooms hold conversations from years ago. Maybe, architecture is just emotional weather in the guise of concrete. Maybe, that is exactly why certain places exhaust us. Maybe, that is why some rooms feel safer. Spaces have a character, they have weather, they have a soul.