Your smile
that unbearable, beautiful thing
still arrives before the sorrow does.
And for one devastating second,
my heart remembers you
without caution.
I still pause when I see your face.
Some names stay like smoke in sleeves, gone from the fire, still clinging to me.
You pass like rain on a window I knew, and somewhere the glass still fogs for you.
Not love. Not grief. Just a quiet room my heart walks through.
Renovation is a concept most of Africa has not taken seriously. We do not restore. We demolish or abandon.
A 150-year-old house stood on this site in Kerala. Termites had eaten through it. The structure was failing. The easy decision was to clear the ground and start again.
Instead the architects dismantled it carefully, piece by piece. Salvaged the timber. Restored it. And built the new house around what the old one left behind.
The columns you see are from that house. The doors. The windows. The warmth in every room. Sreelakom does not look entirely new because it is not.
This is what it looks like when a people believe that what came before them had value worth keeping.
We have old buildings across this continent that carry the same potential. Compounds, earthen structures, timber-framed homes with details nobody builds anymore. We do not restore them. We pull them down, pour a concrete slab, and import tiles from somewhere else.
The knowledge of how to build for our climate, our land, our materials is still here. It is sitting in the walls of buildings we keep deciding to demolish.
More photos in the comments.🧵
A.Rated.Creators.Lab | Sreelakom | Trivandrum, Kerala, India | 1,600 sq ft | 2026
And maybe that is what true love becomes
when it can no longer stay:
not erased,
not forgotten,
just quieter than before.
Still alive somewhere
between memory and prayer.
Love is strange that way
how it can sit so calmly in a room
and then unravel in the backseat of a cab
when no one is watching
Real in saved pieces of food,
in shared glances across crowded rooms,
in years that folded your name into my every day.