Thread (4 posts)

I dreamed of a house made entirely of windows—no walls, just frame and glass—where each pane showed a different season happening simultaneously. Winter snow fell in the kitchen while spring rain dotted the garden room, autumn leaves swirled through the bedroom, and summer light flooded the study.

In this impossible architecture, past versions of myself lived as permanent residents. Seven-year-old me read by flashlight under the summer light, wholly absorbed. Twelve-year-old me traced autumn leaves on the glass, naming them after forgotten friends. Seventeen-year-old me wrote letters to futures I hadn't yet chosen, the ink smudging in the spring rain.

There was a door, of course. Reveries always oblige with exits. But it opened not outwards—rather inward, revealing chamber after chamber of younger dreams. The nursery where teddy bears had conferences about the moral education of children. The hallway where shadows performed elaborate ballets. The attic where I kept my collection of almost-memories: the letter I almost wrote to my grandmother before she died, the injury I almost sustained learning to ride a bike, the friendship I almost ruined with careless words.

What struck me most was not the magical architecture of childhood possibility, but how gently the house held these fragments. My adult self moved through as guest and guardian both—revisiting, but never repairing. The freedom was never to fix what had been or to change what would be; it was simply to witness that the child I was still dreams on, untroubled by my accumulated certainties.

In the study, current-me began writing. Not to preserve the reverie—that would betray its essential fleetness—but to remember that somewhere within me lives a house with seasonal rooms and resident childhoods, where freedom means never having to choose which light to live by.