The House Beyond the River

The river curled like a silver thread at dusk. I used to stand by it, bare feet in the mud, listening to its secrets. It never spoke loudly, only whispered — about rain in far-off hills, about fish darting through the reeds, about things that lived and died and left no trace.

There was a house beyond the river.

Whitewashed walls, a rusting gate, and roses that bloomed wildly, as if no one told them they shouldn’t. I was five when we left it. My mother wept in the back seat, but said nothing. Father’s hands gripped the steering wheel tight, his knuckles pale and stiff.

I came back thirty years later.

Time had worn the house like an old coat. Paint peeled, vines tangled through broken windows. But the soul was still there. Some places remember you, even when you forget yourself.

I sat under the sycamore tree where I once buried a jar of secrets. My name carved into bark beside a clumsy heart. I closed my eyes and heard my brother’s laughter echo through the hollow. He’s gone now. Lost to war, or maybe to silence.

I stepped inside the house.

Dust danced in the air like tired spirits. The fireplace was cold. The kitchen smelled of earth and old wood. I found a spoon still resting on the windowsill, exactly where my mother left it.

I wept.

Not for sadness — but for the sheer weight of memory. How it crawls back into your skin when you let it.

I did not stay long.

Just long enough to remember who I was before the world taught me who I should be.

Ash and Apricot

Grief is not the end. Sometimes, it is just the garden waiting to bloom again

She always smelled like apricot jam and old smoke. My grandmother. The kind of woman who could still a room with a glance, or heal a wound with a hymn.

When she died, the house fell quiet. No one dared to fill her chair by the window. The birds still came, though. She said they knew her by name.

I stayed in her house for the forty days. That’s what she asked for — not prayers, not flowers. Just presence. Just silence.

Each day, I lit her little lamp by the front door. A soft flame, like the ones she believed guided the dead. I would sit beside it, sipping tea, speaking softly to the air.

“Where did you go?” I asked once.

I heard the kettle whistle in reply.

Grief is a strange guest. It sleeps in your bed, wears your clothes. But sometimes, it hands you a seed. Just one. Quiet and dusty.

I planted that seed in her backyard, in the dirt she once called holy. I watered it every morning, whispered her favorite verses, and waited.

The tree that grew was not apricot. It was ash.

Strong, stubborn, slow.

And yet — under it, in the early light, I began to laugh again.