Ponder:The House That Remembered Fire
Ponder
The House That Remembered Fire
There is a house at the edge of my sleep
where the windows have forgotten
how to be windows.
They are wounds now,
stitched with moonlight,
looking out upon a field
of abandoned names.
Every night
the walls inhale.
Every morning
they exhale ghosts.
I know this place.
I have walked its hallways barefoot,
carrying a candle made from years
I could not survive twice.
The staircase climbs nowhere.
Still,
I climb.
At the top waits a room
filled with clocks.
Not one of them keeps time.
Instead,
they measure regret.
One ticks for every apology
that arrived too late.
One ticks for every hand
I should have held longer.
One ticks for the version of myself
buried beneath the rubble
of becoming.
Sometimes
I hear laughter behind the walls.
The kind that belongs
to people who have already forgiven me.
The kind that terrifies me most.
Outside,
winter kneels upon the earth
like a patient god.
Snow gathers in the footprints
of those who left.
The drifts grow deeper.
The footprints remain.
Then dawn arrives,
not as a sunrise,
but as a thief.
It steals the shadows
one by one.
The clocks fall silent.
The walls release their breath.
And for the first time,
the house remembers
it is only a house.
I open the door.
The field of abandoned names
has become a garden.
Beneath the thawing soil,
something impossible is stirring.
Not memory.
Not grief.
A seed.
And though I do not know
what will bloom,
I kneel beside it
as if hope
were the holiest thing
I have ever touched.
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