The shift from the cold hospital room to the past wasn't abrupt. It was slow. Almost gentle, like fog rolling off a morning field.
One blink, and the ceiling lamp was gone. Another blink, and I was staring up at rafters of rough wood, the cracks stuffed with straw, dust drifting downward in the dim light of sunset.
I was back. Back in that small wooden house on the hill.
The house smelled of earth and smoke, our roof often leaked after heavy rains, and the fireplace never fully chased away the damp. Still, it was home. My home.
I must have been no more than six or seven then. My bare feet pressed against the packed dirt floor as I fiddled with a wooden top. My father had carved it for me during one of his quiet evenings. He wasn't a talkative man, but when his hands worked the wood, it felt as if he was speaking to me through it.
"Oi, don't drop it near the door," came the sharp voice of my mother. She was always carrying a pail, always sighing, always rushing. Her hands were rough, cracked from scrubbing and pulling at laundry all day. Her eyes were never soft. Not once, not for me, at least, that's how I remembered it.
Was she unkind? Perhaps not. Perhaps she was simply tired. But to the boy I was back then, she felt like winter, harsh, unyielding, distant.
I remember dinner was always quiet. Just the three of us, sitting cross-legged around a chipped wooden table. The stew would steam, filling the silence. My father, stoic. My mother, cold. And me, shifting in place, hoping someone might laugh, hoping someone might tell a story.
But words rarely came. And when they did… they often came in raised tones.
I can still hear it:
"Why waste money on those?"
"He's still a child."
"That's no excuse! We barely....."
The shouting would ricochet through the wood walls, but oddly enough, I don't remember crying. I would simply sit there, holding my spoon, listening. As if it was normal.
And for me back then, it was.
Yet… not all moments were heavy.
I recall a morning when my father carried me up the sloping path behind the house. His hands, calloused from work, gripped mine firmly, not painfully, but with strength enough that I felt safe. We stood there at the crest of the hill, the wind pushing against us. Below stretched the fields, golden under the lazy sun, dotted with other small houses and the laughter of children.
"Someday," he said, voice low, "this world won't feel so small."
I didn't understand then what he meant. But the way he looked, not at me, but at the horizon, left something in my chest, a strange heaviness.
Regret? Hope? Maybe both.
The boy I was back then lived between those moments, between warmth too brief to grasp and shadows too heavy to dismiss. It was a life both ordinary and complicated, a fabric woven with love unspoken and sorrow unrecognized.
And now, lying here decades later, I wonder if I was ever truly lonely… or if I only realized the loneliness much later, when childhood had already slipped into memory.
The small house on the hill.
My first stage, my first cage.
And from there, I grew.