The change from the cold hospital room to the past wasn't sudden. It happened slowly, almost gently, like fog rolling off a morning field.
One blink, and the ceiling lamp disappeared. Another blink, and I was looking up at rough wooden rafters, the cracks stuffed with straw, dust floating down in the dim light of sunset. I was 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 dampness. Still, it felt like 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 played with a wooden top. My father had carved it for me during one of his quiet evenings. He wasn't much of a talker, but when he worked the wood, it felt like he was speaking to me through it.
"Oi, don't drop it near the door," my mother's sharp voice rang out. She always carried a pail, always sighed, always rushed. Her hands were rough and 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 remember it.
Was she unkind? Maybe not. Maybe she was just tired. But to the boy I was back then, she felt like winter—cold, unyielding, distant.
Dinner was always quiet. Just the three of us, sitting cross-legged around a chipped wooden table. The stew steamed, filling the silence. My father was stoic. My mother was cold. And I sat fidgeting, hoping someone might laugh, hoping someone might tell a story.
But words rarely came. And when they did, they often came in raised voices.
I can still hear it:
"Why waste money on toys?"
"He's still a child."
"That's no excuse! We barely—"
The shouting would bounce off the wooden walls, but strangely enough, I don't remember crying. I would simply sit there, holding my spoon, listening. It felt normal to me then.
Yet not all moments were heavy.
I remember a morning when my father carried me up the sloping path behind the house. His hands, calloused from work, held mine firmly—not painfully, but with enough strength that I felt safe. We stood at the crest of the hill, the wind pushing against us. Below stretched the fields, golden under the lazy sun, filled with small houses and the laughter of children.
"Someday," he said, his 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 in those moments—between warmth too brief to hold and shadows too heavy to ignore. It was a life both ordinary and complicated, woven with love unspoken and sorrow unnoticed.
And now, decades later, I wonder if I was ever truly lonely… or if I only recognized the loneliness much later, when childhood had already faded into memory.
The small house on the hill.
My first stage, my first cage.
And from there, I grew.