The Ground Beneath My Grief

The Ground Beneath My Grief

There was a time when I couldn't look down.

Not at my hands, not at the floor, not at the worn-out edges of the life I'd been dragging behind me like a broken suitcase with no wheels. The apartment I rented after everything fell apart had floors that creaked in the wrong places—laminate that someone before me had installed badly, or maybe just honestly, the way I'd lived: without measuring, without pausing, without asking if the ground could hold me. It couldn't. So one winter morning, when the heating bill came and I realized I'd been cold for months without noticing, I decided to rip it all up. Not the grief—I wasn't ready for that—but the floor. The floor I could touch.

People think measuring a room is about numbers. Length times width equals square meters equals packs of laminate equals a finished project equals a life that looks like it's moving forward. They're wrong. Measuring a room when you're broken is about learning to look at corners again. It's about kneeling in the space where you used to feel safe and admitting that nothing is square, nothing is level, nothing is as simple as the tape measure promised. The walls lean. The doorways sag. There's a gap under the radiator where winter lives year-round, and you've been pretending not to see it because seeing it would mean admitting that this place—this body, this heart—was never built to code.

I started in the bedroom. Not because it made sense, but because that's where I woke up every morning and remembered I was still here. The room was small, maybe three meters by four, with a window that faced a brick wall and a closet door that never closed all the way. I pulled the old furniture to the center and stood at the threshold with a tape measure I'd bought three months earlier and never opened. The metal tab was cold. I let it spool out across the floor, watching the yellow ribbon stretch and tremble, and for the first time in a long time, I felt something like honesty.

The first measurement was wrong. I measured wall to wall and wrote down 3.2 meters, but when I checked again, it was 3.18. Then 3.21. Then I realized my hands were shaking, and the tape was bending where the floor dipped near the window, and I was crying without sound because even this—this one simple thing—I couldn't get right. I sat on the floor and let the tape measure coil back into itself with a snap that sounded like a door closing. I thought about leaving it. I thought about calling someone to do it for me. I thought about how much easier it would be to just live on a floor that hurt to walk on, because at least that pain was familiar.

But I didn't leave. I measured again. This time I pressed the tape flat, held it taut against the baseboard, and read the number three times before I believed it. 3.19 meters. Close enough to 3.2 that I could live with it. I wrote it down in a notebook that used to hold grocery lists and therapy appointments, and I moved to the next wall. The width was easier—2.87 meters, no argument, no second-guessing. I sketched the room as a rectangle, rough and graceless, and labeled each side. It looked like a child's drawing. It looked like a plan.

The math was supposed to be simple. Multiply length by width, add ten percent for waste, divide by the coverage per pack, round up. But nothing about this felt simple. I stared at the numbers and felt the weight of them—9.15 square meters of space I'd been living in without really inhabiting, plus another 0.92 for mistakes I hadn't made yet but knew I would. Ten packs of laminate, the man at the hardware store said, and I nodded because I didn't know how to say that I wasn't just buying flooring, I was buying the possibility that I could build something that wouldn't collapse under me.

I carried the boxes home on two trips because I didn't ask for help. I stacked them in the hallway and let them sit there for three days, unopened, while I vacuumed the subfloor and filled the low spots with leveling compound that smelled like wet concrete and regret. The instructions said to let the planks acclimate for 48 hours, so I did, because following rules felt like a kind of safety I hadn't known in months. I measured the perimeter for baseboards—11.2 meters, plus ten percent, divided by 2.4-meter lengths, so six pieces, maybe seven if I was clumsy with the miter saw. I wasn't clumsy. I was terrified. But I bought seven anyway, because that's what you do when you've learned that running out halfway through is worse than having too much left over.

The underlay went down first, a thin gray membrane that hissed when I unrolled it and felt like walking on air that hadn't decided to hold you yet. I taped the seams the way the package told me to, overlapping nothing, trusting that this fragile layer would somehow protect everything above it from the cold concrete below. I left a ten-millimeter gap around the edges—expansion space, they call it, but it felt more like breathing room, the kind you give yourself when you're not sure you deserve it. I placed the spacers against the walls and told myself this was temporary, that I'd cover the gaps later with trim, that no one would see the emptiness I was leaving behind on purpose.

The first plank clicked into place with a sound that was almost violent. I'd aligned it parallel to the longest wall, tongue facing out, and tapped it with a rubber mallet until the joint locked and I couldn't pull it apart even when I wanted to. The second plank followed, then the third, each one a small commitment to finishing what I'd started. I staggered the seams the way the instructions insisted, offsetting each row by at least 30 centimeters so the floor wouldn't buckle or look like a ladder. It was slow. It was repetitive. It was the first thing I'd done in months that didn't feel like running.

By the fourth row, my knees ached and my hands smelled like sawdust and I'd made my first real mistake—a plank too short for the space, cut before I'd measured twice. I stared at it, this useless piece of wood with a clean edge and no place to go, and I didn't scream or break it or throw it against the wall. I just set it aside and cut another one, slower this time, more careful, because waste wasn't failure. Waste was just the cost of learning to build something that fit.

The doorway was the hardest part. Where the bedroom met the hallway, the floor heights didn't match—laminate on one side, old tile on the other, a two-millimeter difference that would catch every toe and every thought if I didn't bridge it properly. I measured the width of the threshold, cut a T-molding to size, and pressed it into the track I'd screwed into the subfloor. It sat there, neat and deliberate, a small piece of trim that said this room is separate but not sealed off, that you can walk between what was and what's becoming without tripping.

I finished on a Sunday afternoon when the light was falling sideways through the window and the new floor gleamed in a way the old one never had. I pulled the spacers out from the edges and installed the baseboards, nailing them into the wall—not the floor—so the laminate could still move, still breathe, still expand and contract with the seasons the way I was learning to. I swept up the sawdust and the offcuts and the small debris of transformation, and then I stood in the center of the room and pressed my bare feet against the planks. They were cool. They were level. They were mine.

I didn't measure that room because I needed new flooring. I measured it because I needed to prove to myself that I could see a space clearly, that I could plan for what it required, that I could cut and fit and adjust until something broken became something whole. The tape measure taught me that corners aren't perfect, that walls lie, that you always need more than you think you do. The laminate taught me that things can float without falling, that gaps aren't weaknesses but allowances, that sometimes you have to rip everything up before you can lay anything down that will hold.

There are other rooms now. The kitchen. The hallway. Spaces I haven't touched yet because I'm still learning to walk on the ground I've already built. But I know how to start. I know to look at the edges first, to sketch what I see, to add ten percent for the mistakes I'll make and forgive. I know that measuring isn't about getting it perfect—it's about getting it true enough that you can stand on it without fear. And I know that sometimes the most important thing you can do is kneel in the ruins of what didn't work and ask yourself, carefully and quietly, what it would take to build a floor that feels like home.