This video diary is inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven and its haunting meditation on loneliness, anticipation, and absence. The poem’s imagery, especially the knocking at the door with no one behind it, became a reflection of my own experience with grief. At the time, I too was living with the reminder of someone who was no longer present. The silence that followed those reminders became just as heavy as the loss itself. The piece captures that tension, the yearning for someone to arrive and the hollow ache of realizing no one ever does.

   The video unfolds against a backdrop of a drawn interior, animated with subtle movements. Snow drifts outside a window and the fire flickers in the fireplace. Yet the room itself remains unoccupied, waiting. The space is carefully designed to feel lived in but uninhabited, embodying the ache of anticipation and the emptiness that lingers when presence never comes.

   In both the poem and my video, the knock becomes more than a sound. It is a reminder of absence. The work explores how grief is not only tied to memory but also to the ongoing daily reminders of what should be there but is not. By pairing Poe’s timeless sense of dread with my own lived experience of loss, this video diary becomes both personal and universal. It is a meditation on absence as an inescapable part of human existence.

Created with Adobe Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Garage band, pen, markers and paper