Requiem for a Lonely Woman

In the outskirts, where whispers weave through the wind, there stands a farmhouse, its timbers groaning with secrets, a silhouette etched against the horizon’s fading light. Once, it was alive, pulsing with the beat of day-to-day, but now, it’s shrouded in a cloak of solitude, walls lined with the echoes of laughter long gone, rooms filled with the heavy air of stories untold. The woman who lived there, a mystery, a shadow, wandered its halls like a ghost, her presence barely felt but in the gentle ivory caress of piano keys that floated through the night, a sorrowful symphony played to an audience of moon and stars. Folks in town, they gossiped, cruel jests hidden behind closed doors, labeling her a recluse, a witch, a specter of the past, never understanding the weight of loneliness she carried, a burden that bent her shoulders and dulled her eyes. She found peace in her music, notes rising and falling, like the breaths she drew, deep and resonant, a language only she and the night could comprehend. The farmhouse, with its peeling paint and creaking floors, stood as a testament to her existence, its decay mirroring the abandonment she felt, doors no longer opening to welcome guests, windows looking out with a yearning for the world. Inside, the piano waited, its keys now silent, dust gathering like a blanket, a comfort in the stillness, each particle a memory, a moment frozen in time. And so, the house remains, a relic of loneliness, a monument to the misunderstood, its story floating with the wind, carried through the fields, a melody played on the strings of time, eternal, echoing, alone.