The new shop is a new chapter for me, and that’s good, but at the same time, seeing the old shop empty makes me sad.

There’s this saying: if you stay in one place too long you become that place. I’ve spent a considerable portion of my life here for the last eight years. It’s always been a shabby yet functional kind of a deal, sort of like me. It was my place and my shop. The effort and the work to make a living in this cutthroat business… I’ve outlasted numerous competitors over the years and this was the location that let me do it. I feel I owe it something, I don’t know why.

So much time. So many people.

I can still see them when I close my eyes, working there at the benches in the lab, my apprentices, my former partner, my friends. The times we had there working away, happy to be hacking, happy to be up to our elbows in sharp, filthy, dangerous, wonderful technology. The burnouts, the frustration, the perfection, the retina detaching hacks… lots of great memories.

They all needed to move on and I’m alone now. But I still remember the good times like they were yesterday. Maybe I dwell too much in yesterday.

A customer once described the clutter he saw in the lab as “passion”. He was more right than he knew. It was eight years worth of mental clutter, perfectly organized. An extension of my mind into the physical world. I think the new shop will get there too, but it’s going to take a while to really get the passion back. The component parts of the old shop are still around of course, but strewn around the new shop in unfamiliar and disquieting ways. The rooms of the old shop are also still down there, but they’re empty and barren and they haunt me when I see them so.

And that makes me sad.

Thanks to my mates who helped make the move happen. I asked for muscle and that’s exactly what I got. Thank you.