Through my window, I gaze upon my world

I’ve always admired the children who can spend time with themselves. Those children are a tiny bit different from the ones who grow up in need of tenderness. I imagine them scampering across the garden, their laughter rising like bells in the breeze. When they are alone, they idle in play, watching the sky, lost in their own thoughts. They emanate a sense of being in their best moments, unless someone interrupts them.

A limitless happiness from an unknown source. Their joy takes nothing, depletes nothing from where it springs.

Once they grow older, whatever comes with age begins to reshape their minds. Interactions with the outside world wound their pure inner pages, their world, their mind, because they never thought to protect it. Fragile, defenceless serenity. What was once whole changes brutally.

The playground where they once ran freely becomes a path impossible to walk without stumbling.

I see myself as one of those children, though with a slight difference. I never scampered across my world; instead, I watched the one I had created in the corner of my mind, as if through a window.

When the first snowflakes grace the earth,

A stove-lit room, steeped in the scent of food,

The cold seeping through the window.

A boy, eyes wide with awe at the falling snow,

Leaving fog on the glass with his nose

That boy was none other than me.

For this reason, I do not stumble.

I do not move. I did not run.

I only feel sorrow for what I witness.