The Cartography of Rooms

Dust settles like sediment on the bookshelf, each layer a year. I trace the spine-breaks, the foxed pages that remember fingers, the margin notes in someone else's careful script.

The kitchen holds its breath at dawn— light slants through the window in the same angle it did in photographs from decades past. The kettle hums its small familiar song.

In the hallway, shadows pool like water. The floorboards know every footstep, every late-night pacing, every barefoot dash toward something we thought we needed.

And in the corner where the curtains fray, a spider's web catches the light, fracturing it into constellations— this small rebellion of geometry against time.

We are all just rooms with doors, collecting light and dust and the weight of all the people who've stood where we stand, breathing the same air, thinking their own thoughts.