Work Text:
FLOOR PLAN: HEART (UNINHABITABLE)
scale: immeasurable
materials: red-stained pride, mother’s ghost, unpaid debts, his laugh echoing in empty halls, floor plans scrawled in midnight, and silence thick enough to hang drywall on
Room A1: Childhood Bedroom
Windows facing west, always letting in too much sun.
The light bleached his dreams out of the wallpaper.
The walls still carry the fingerprints of a boy who thought being good would be enough.
There’s a stuffed toy in the corner—headless now. He named it after a poet.
Reconstruction Note: Stop preserving this room. Let it burn. Let it bloom.
Inscribed in floorboards: “One day, you will leave. The sun will not apologize.”
Room A2: Studio
Drafting table covered in calluses and forgotten dreams.
Crumpled blueprints like fallen birds litter the floor.
He drew his first cathedral at fourteen. Called it Solace. Never built it.
The walls are lined with rejection letters—framed, ironically.
The plants are dead. He waters them anyway.
Annotation: This is where I learned to make suffering symmetrical.
Unbuilt addition: a window he never opened. A door he never locked.
Room A3: The Room Where He Loved Him (Secretly)
Small. Tucked behind structural illusions.
Lit only by moonlight and arguments.
The walls are soundproof, but the silence still screams.
He kissed the air here, once, as if it might carry the message next door.
Plaque on the door: "Not a weakness. A blueprint."
Corridor B: The Hall of Misunderstood Intentions
Every step here echoes like an unfinished sentence.
Lined with portraits of men who never looked back.
A mirror halfway down—cracked from the inside.
Inscription etched on glass: “Design flaw: kindness mistaken for surrender.”
Creaking floorboards whisper: you always talk too much, Kaveh.
There is no door to this hallway. Only silence.
Note: The hallway loops if you doubt yourself. He’s been walking it for years.
STRUCTURAL NOTES (INVISIBLE LOAD-BEARING WALLS):
Alhaitham
Exists like a steel beam disguised as apathy.
Holds up the roof of Kaveh’s restraint without meaning to.
Talks like logic is its own form of kindness.
Footnote 1: He doesn’t know he’s the reason I haven’t collapsed yet.
Footnote 2: Or maybe he does. Maybe that’s worse.
Kaveh wanted philosophy to be a door. Alhaitham built walls.
When they argue, the whole structure rattles. Kaveh calls it “ventilation.”
Invisible Sketch on Beam: “If I kiss you, the whole house comes down.”
His Father's Voice
Still lives in the insulation.
Says things like “You can’t build safety for others when you live in ruin.”
And: “Don’t forget your name. Even when they only call you genius.”
Side note: His ghost often disagrees with his architectural choices.
Especially the skylight. Especially the warmth.
He keeps his handwriting inside an old book pressed between diagrams. Sometimes it glows. Sometimes it scolds.
He died before he could see the Palace of Alcazarzaray.
He doesn’t know if he would’ve been proud. Or horrified.
WINDOWS: 14 (BROKEN: 11, SEALED SHUT: 2, ALWAYS OPEN: 1)
Each broken pane a confession.
Each confession a glass cut he hid beneath his sleeves.
He used to throw open windows like declarations. Now he drafts them with locks.
The open one faces north. That’s where the wind is cruelest.
He likes the way it hurts. It reminds him he’s still here.
Inscription above it: “Here. Despite.”
He doesn’t believe in fresh air.
He believes in old rooms made new through forgiveness.
But forgiveness is the most expensive material. And it’s always backordered.
PLUMBING: QUESTIONABLE
Tears leak through the walls when no one’s looking.
He blames the humidity.
Alhaitham doesn’t comment.
Which somehow hurts more than if he did.
There’s a faucet that only runs when he lies.
The bathtub is shaped like a confession booth.
He sits in it fully clothed.
Design flaw. Or maybe design perfection.
The pipes hum at night—old songs, mother’s lullabies, the sound of I’m fine said too fast.
Sometimes they shriek.
He pretends it's wind.
FOUNDATION (POURED IN SHAME)
One part grief, two parts stubbornness,
Mixed under a blood moon.
Cured in the echo of applause he never asked for.
“You’re a genius,” they said.
He wanted to be kind, not impressive.
But the world funds monuments, not mercy.
Engraved in bedrock: “You cannot cry in marble. Only remember.”
He built the foundation with unpaid labor—his own.
He didn’t know exhaustion could be an architectural principle.
He didn’t know guilt could be load-bearing.
BLUEPRINT REVISIONS (NEVER SENT):
Draft 1: Include a garden. Make it open. Let things grow even if they leave.
Draft 2: Make a room just for dancing. Or crying. Or both.
Draft 3: Erase everything. Start again. This time, don’t flinch when the roof caves in.
Draft 4: Put his name in the corner of every page. As if that makes it real.
Draft 5: Build without expecting anyone to stay.
Draft 6: Leave space. Leave space. Leave space for someone who might.
He keeps these drafts in a drawer labeled “Too Soft to Survive.”
He opens it on sleepless nights.
Sometimes, he adds more. Sometimes, he just folds them back inside and bleeds into the silence.
ELEVATION VIEW: HOPE (UNFINISHED)
To love is to raise scaffolding around a collapsing building and say,
"It’s still beautiful. We can still save this."
Kaveh says that about everything—about nations, about old friends,
about himself.
He builds and builds and builds, even as the wrecking ball swings behind him.
He doesn’t look back.
If he does, the entire house might fall.
One time, he let someone else draft the future.
It came out square, gray, efficient.
He buried the paper in the backyard.
He planted a tree on top of it. It never grew.
He believes in curvature.
In arches, in spirals, in the way hands find each other even when logic says they shouldn’t.
He calls that structure.
ATTIC (FORGOTTEN THINGS)
A sketch of his father. Torn.
A bottle of ink he never used.
A note from his mother: “Forgive me. I had no blueprint for motherhood.”
Old love letters: none addressed to him. All opened anyway.
Broken measuring tools. Bent by trembling hands.
A statue of Alhaitham made from ash and denial. Crumbling.
APPENDIX: THINGS KAVEH WILL NEVER SAY ALOUD
“I wish you would hold my hand without thinking it meant weakness.”
“I forgive you for not understanding. I never made it easy.”
“I wish I could stop seeing broken things as puzzles meant for me.”
“I am tired of being the patron saint of lost causes.”
“I want to go home. But I don’t know where that is anymore.”
“I built the Palace so someone would say I was worth something. No one did.”
“Do you still remember the first time we disagreed? I do. It cracked something.”
“I don’t want to be right. I want to be held.”
FINAL STAMP: APPROVED FOR DEMOLITION (DATE UNKNOWN)
But until then, he builds.
He drafts.
He argues about rent and paints over bruises and teaches children that arches are not just curves,
they are acts of resistance.
He is a man of tension and grace, tragedy and polish.
He is not whole.
But he is standing.
And that, perhaps,
is the most beautiful structure of all.