The Warmth at the Window

The sun came in. Not like light—more like memory. yeah.

I was sitting inside, in the apartment, with another tiled building across from me, all its windows shut. I could hear the leaves though. Couldn’t see the trees, but the sound was there, reaching me. our clothes were on the balcony, moving slow in the wind. The wind touching everything so gently it almost felt deliberate.

And then, without warning, something i realized. The warmth beneath the cold air—that particular mix—and suddenly I wasn’t here anymore. I was in Nepal. In the little courtyard. Dust, mud, and green edges of plants everywhere. My mother outside, heating water. My brother beside me. It was Saturday, no school. She bathed us under that sun—this same sun—and it landed on our skin, soft and gold, and we didn’t know it was happiness. It just was.

I didn’t know all of that had stayed somewhere inside me.

And now, days like this—when I feel alone, or when joy swells too much to hold—it all comes forward. My father. My mother. My brother. And later, my wife. My son, The dogs, the cats. everything. And later still, when I thought I understood the shape of my writing—Grace.

Grace arrived quietly, as the ones who matter always do.

I want to describe this day to you. The blue, the warmth, this wind. I want to name what the sun is doing to me—to my skin, my chest, that hidden place behind the ribs with no name. But there’s no word for it. There’s never been one. Every language, every poet who’s ever sat at a window like this—none of them left me the word I need. And it angers me. The day is perfect, and “perfect” is useless. It’s too small for this. The thing I want to say is too big for language.

Grace used to say, softly, every day—why don’t you write? one more essay. read it to me. Something about that fueled me. I wrote like someone possessed. Wine, beer, long nights—three months, forty-six essays. She’s in the third book, Who Will Bury the Dead God? She’s the pulse beneath every line, the reason I kept going.

And now, here again: the window, the light, the wind. My father, my mother, my brother, that courtyard, that Saturday, My wife, my son….. Grace—the forty-six essays—all of it here together, uninvited but completely present, like it was always waiting for me to return.

I don’t know why today.

Because? The light just tilted right! And for a moment, it told the truth, I suppose.