Light through the window

Every morning in this house begins the same way — not with the ticking of a clock or the rustle of footsteps, but with light. It pours through the window as if it knows every crack in the floorboards, every rusty nail in the wall, each story this space has ever held. This light isn’t just illumination. It arrives like a memory, as though it’s here to remind me: the house is alive.

I sit at the edge of my old wooden bed — creaky, solid — and watch as golden dust slowly dances through the air. You don’t see it in the evening, nor at night. Only in the morning, when the window is open, and the branches of the old plane tree outside cast shadows that resemble hands waving from the past.

Once, I was young. I played guitar in a small jazz ensemble. We performed in basement clubs, where the ceiling was low and the air was thick with smoke and hope. Back then, music was home — not a place, but a sound. We lived inside it like a fortress.

But now, things are different. Now home is home. Real. With chipped plaster, forgotten blueprints scattered on the floor, and carved moldings I once collected during a restoration. These fragments of old beauty are like half-remembered chords — suddenly returning, uninvited, warm not from sunlight, but from time.

Sometimes I think the walls are listening. That they remember when I first played “Autumn Leaves” on the balcony, under an open sky, before the house had heating or gas. They remember the voice of the girl who once stayed until morning and laughed because the sunlight landed right on her eyelashes.

A man doesn’t die all at once like a tree. He dies slowly, day by day, when he stops being amazed  

— wrote Erich Maria Remarque

The house — it is still amazed. Every day. By this light, these shadows, these quiet footsteps. And so am I. In the morning, I am not an old man. I’m part of something vast: a sunbeam, a floorboard, a pattern in the wallpaper, the clink of a teaspoon. Simple things. Like music, they ask for nothing — only that you listen.

That’s how we live, the house and I. It holds me, and I hold it. Each in our own rhythm. Each in our own light.