Inventory of a Borrowed House

We move in as if the walls remember someone else's hands, the doorframe still warm where another family measured its children against the years.

In the kitchen, a previous light leans through the same window, indifferent to whose cup it warms. I learn the floor's small confessions— which boards keep secrets, which give us away.

At night the pipes rehearse a language older than the deed, and I lie listening, a tenant of my own breathing, counting the rooms that will outlive me.

Come morning I water the plant the last owners abandoned, green and stubborn on the sill, and understand at last: nothing here is mine, and everything is on loan.

We are only the keepers of a while, handing the keys forward, leaving our heat in the wood, our shapes pressed faintly into the soft dust of arrival.