The sun spilled wide across the fields. Golden, endless, alive.
The house on the hill felt smaller in summer, because outside stretched a world so wide that my legs alone couldn't claim it, but oh, how I tried. Barefoot, reckless, I ran.
I remember the grass cutting slightly at my ankles, the smell of dirt rising with every hurried step. There was laughter too, not just mine, but the laughter of others.
The other village children.
I can still recall their faces, though time has blurred them. Some names I've forgotten, others I only whisper to myself like secrets.
"Catch me if you can!" one would shout.
And off we went, chasing one another until our lungs collapsed, hearts pounding, eyes burning from the sun and dust.
In those hours, I wasn't the boy trapped between silence and quarrel. I wasn't just "the son" sitting quietly during suppers. No, I was free. A runner. A dreamer. Someone whose legs could carry him faster than the weight of worries at home.
There was a river too. People washed clothes there, but for us, it was a kingdom.
We skipped stones. The older boys dared each other to swim across, though the current was much stronger than we wanted to admit. I stayed close to the banks, gathering the smooth pebbles, marveling at the colors hidden under running water.
It was simple, unremarkable. And yet, those memories glow brighter than most of adulthood ever did.
Funny, isn't it? How the smallest fragments of time burn themselves into us more than the years chasing wealth or recognition.
Of course… even in that warmth, shadows followed.
I recall once returning home after a long day by the fields. My shirt torn, my knees scraped from a fall. I entered the house with a grin, expecting my mother's sigh, my father's scolding, that strange mixture of care and reprimand every child knows.
Instead, I found silence.
My parents weren't speaking. My mother's arms were crossed, her jaw tight, her face turned away. My father's eyes stayed fixed on the floorboards.
"…Eat your dinner," was all she said.
No one noticed my wounds.
That night, I remember sitting cross-legged, poking at the stew. The scratches stung, but what hurt far more was the absence, that simple truth that joy outside didn't always survive inside those walls.
And so I learned: freedom could be borrowed, never owned.
Still, I clung to those blazing afternoons of summer. Even now, in this frail body nearing its end, if I close my eyes hard enough, I can feel the earth beneath my feet, the taste of sun on my tongue, the laughter echoing across the valley.
For a boy caught between distance and duty, summer was salvation.
It was the seed of something greater, though I didn't yet know it.
The first realization that the world carried more than the boundaries of my home.
The first time I thought, perhaps, just perhaps, I was meant to reach for something beyond the hill.