Where the Sky Remains Open

He lives now in a room with no doors, only windows. Once, there were paths leading outward, roads that curved into forests, flights that cut into distant dawns. But time has gathered those roads, folded them neatly, and placed them on a high shelf. The windows remain, though, offering him a view into the life he used to walk.

He leans into the glass and remembers the boy who chased birds across open fields, who believed the sky was a promise. The young man who held maps like love letters, who woke in cities where no one called his name. He recalls the pulse of possibility that once lived inside him, wild and uncontained.

Now, he finds his freedom differently.

He travels inward, slipping quietly into the corridors of remembrance. There, he is still running, still laughing, still untethered. He stands barefoot in the rain of a summer fifteen years gone. He hears the music of a night when everything felt like the beginning of something grand.

In these soft spaces of memory, he becomes weightless. Time cannot bind him there, nor expectation. He is both who he was and who he is, reconciled for a moment by the tenderness of recalling.

The room around him may have no exit, but the windows, those windows, are endless. Through them, he touches the edges of all he ever was, and the sky, it seems, is still open.