Hello, there!

It was the kind of afternoon that made time hesitate. The garden lay suspended in a hush, as if the world had exhaled and decided to stay that way for a while. Trees, tall and gnarled with age, stood cloaked in saffron light, their leaves turning shades of burnt amber and rust.  Somewhere in the center of it all, under a wooden pergola wrapped in ivy and old, sleeping roses, a swing creaked ever so gently. A boy sat there, legs curled, back slightly hunched, lost in the pages of a book so worn it looked like it had belonged to generations before him. Sunlight filtered through the latticed branches overhead, dappling his face with moving gold. His fingers occasionally paused on a line, not to turn the page, but to feel the weight of a word. A woolen shawl hung loosely around his shoulders, and next to him lay a steaming cup of something that smelled faintly of cardamom and crushed cloves. Beyond the garden, faint outlines of mountains watched in silence, draped in a gentle haze that...

I’ve lived in the mountains. Not visited or passed through or stayed for the season, but truly lived where the trees remember more than people do. Woken up to the sound of silence so complete it felt like the earth was pausing to listen. There is something there, something you don’t quite see but always feel. It creeps into your bones no matter the weather, snow or sun, and settles behind your ribs like a secret. The place doesn’t try to impress you. It doesn’t perform. It just exists with such quiet magnitude that you can’t help but feel watched. Not in a fearful way, but in a way that makes you soften, makes you smaller in the most honest sense. You don’t live on a mountain. You live inside it. And some nights, if you’re still enough, you can almost hear it breathing.

The sky had been threatening melodrama all day. By 4:30 PM, it delivered. In Nat’s office, somewhere deep in a city that didn’t believe in subtlety, the rain slammed against the glass like it had unresolved issues. The kind of downpour that made traffic lights look like crying eyes and turned everyone’s socks into existential metaphors. Inside, it smelled faintly of printer ink, rain-damped concrete, and too much ambition. The AC was confused. The room was trying to be both winter and wet monsoon. Nat, hunched slightly over a scaled site plan for a new exhibition center, was chewing the end of her pen like it owed her answers. Her heels were kicked off under the table. A cold oat latte stood untouched to her left, and a very sassy notification on Slack had just made her rethink the company’s entire hiring policy. Across some unknown-but-not-so-distant part of town, or was it a different city altogether? Who knew anymore,  Miles was in a meeting room that looked like a design m...