When the last person moves out of these yellowing walls, you won't be here to see it, but that doesn't mean you can't see the crack. It runs along the first floor, along the pavement, along the lift buttons that, despite everything, continue to glow. You trace it along its subtle path, past shut windows (it is three in the afternoon, on the hottest day of the month), past empty doormats (sandwiching stacks of flyers), past rusting electrical meters (suspended, their seven-segment displays). Its hairline width traps dust, fine grains of sand. As you cross the block it widens slightly, until you find that they have started stuffing bits of detritus into it: used tissues, cigarette butts, empty plastic bags. It's a shame, really -- they upgraded the place in the 00's -- but that's the price one pays for borrowed time.

You grow adept at reading the signs. A flat, vacated, suspends its breath; you can feel its pressure through the gaps between the grilles. And a door closed for the final time exhibits a rigour not unlike mammals after death. A hermeneutics of absences thus emerge. Between each knock, and the silence that proceeds it, are volumes of stillnesses waiting to be read. You learn further scopic discourses: living rooms encased behind clean glass, paint chips flaking under the gate, walls stripped of everything but Chinese New Year decals. From these texts, a lexicon of departure, identifying different speeds, different affects, in which the space of a flat reclaims itself whole. Here, a suitcase was wheeled across the threshold, leaving tracks where even dust is reluctant to settle in. Here, the gate's chained from the outside. A row of wilted cacti, too bulky to fit into the car; wind chimes left to guard an empty home.

Now a prediction of the future. The crack grows, until it is wide enough to fit a corpse, and the silence continues to write in the absence of living bodies until it overflows from the windows, spilling white noise onto the tracks where the trains once passed. The grass will overtake the pavement, and the wind will collect its chimes, leaving nothing but a void and solid ground. They'll fill it with new blocks, forty, fifty stories high (with no void decks, same like before), just to make sure that the space does not overwrite itself. They won't permit silence here, or football. They'll fill it with prefab units, aligned so tight as to not admit gaps, and warm bodies to speak life into the rooms. They'll paint it fresh colours, and give it new names; of the ones who came before, they'll put a plaque by the lift lobby commemorating their stay.

This, then, is how a memory dies.