The House That Time Became A.R.ABDULLAH I used to think the road went somewhere, that every little leaving meant there, but years are rivers, quiet and wide, they carry the child we were inside. I remember the window, yellow with rain, the old wooden floor and its beautiful stain, the moon like a coin in the midnight blue, and all of the dreams I believed would come true. There were mornings that smelled like bread, and songs that lived softly inside my head, a bird on the wire, a cup on the chair, the whole world asleep, but I was still there. I thought growing meant learning to fly, to gather my courage and reach for the sky, but maybe it means, when the bright things depart, learning to carry their light in your heart. And people will leave like leaves from a tree, not always from sorrow, not always from me. Some loves are a season, some homes are a year, some names become echoes you still want to hear. I've learned that the heart is a strange little room, it keeps things that died, yet it still makes them bloom. It plants old summers beneath winter snow, and somehow remembers what time tells it: go. So I go. Not because I am finished with yesterday's rain, not because I've forgotten the sweetness and pain, but because every ending, however it bends, is a door wearing darkness, pretending it ends. And sometimes at night, when the whole world is still, I dream of the boy on the old windowsill, his hands full of stars, his pockets of stone, believing that someday he'd find his way home. I want to tell him, you don't have to run. The moon doesn't hurry to become the sun. The tree doesn't question the shape of its leaves, and the river lets go of the things that it grieves. You will lose things. You will change names. You will outgrow rooms and still miss their frames. You will become someone your younger heart knows, like a house seen from far through the wintering snow. And maybe that's living, not winning, not knowing, but planting a garden and watching it growing; then sitting beneath it when you're old and gray, with dirt on your fingers and dusk in the day, and smiling because you once wanted the sky, but found something softer was passing you by: a small patch of sunlight, a bird's evening song, a hand you once held when the whole world felt wrong, a cup left beside you, a door left ajar, the quiet realization that you already are somewhere you dreamed of, though nothing is grand, just older, still breathing, with earth in your hands. And if I could go backward, I wouldn't undo the sorrow that shaped me, the skies I outgrew. I'd thank every goodbye that taught me to stay, every dream that grew distant, then changed me its way. For time isn't a thief if we learn how to see, it only turns what was into what we can be. So let the old houses fall into the light. Let childhood grow quiet. Let morning be night. Let dreams change their colors. Let rivers run free. Let who I was yesterday sleep peacefully. And tomorrow, perhaps, when the first sparrows sing, I'll open the window and welcome the spring. Not as who I was, not as who I should be, but simply a person still learning to see that life is not somewhere we finally arrive. It's the road under moonlight. It's being alive.
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