The written loom

(.. The Friendship Before Time)

The house had gone silent..
Not out of fear, but awe..
For the first time, something old was about to see itself..

The house had begun to change..
Not suddenly.. Not completely..
But as if something on the surface was fading, and something underneath was being revealed..

Corners widened..
Shadows deepened..
And some nights, the light would breathe on its own..

Then, one evening, a wall was gone.

Not broken..
Not torn down..
Simply.. not there..

In its place, a mist..

And behind the mist, the lake..
That lake..
The Japanese one..
With a kind of light that obeyed no sun..

Time began to hesitate..
To stretch..
Like a breath that couldn’t quite be exhaled..

And then, in the hallway between the library and the postcard room, the old mirror, the one that always reflected the foyer, stopped reflecting..

It turned to water..

And within it, Talitha saw a face that was not her own..

It was Hana..

Half of her face, veiled..
The other half, wounded..

Her voice made no sound…
Yet her memory echoed louder than presence.

Talitha stepped closer..
She stood before her..

She didn’t know whether she was looking at the reflection of her soul or at someone who had waited for centuries..

Hana saw her, too..
Her eyes were calm, but within them lived an ancient fatigue, like someone who had carried words across a thousand lives..

Neither spoke..

Yet both moved their lips..
Each said the phrase she felt, but no one heard it..

Their fingers touched the mirror from opposite sides..
And at that place of contact, the glass shivered, but did not break..

Time was not ready..

But friendship had already recognized itself..

Elsewhere in the house, inks stirred..
Scrolls fluttered like wings..
Books whispered foreign words that somehow sounded.. familiar..

Talitha took a step back, but the house pulled her forward..

There was no more before or after..
Only the in-between..

And just before the image dissolved, each woman dropped a word to the floor on her side of the glass..

No one heard them..
But the ink remembered..

It began to write them over and over again:

“I remembered..”
“I recognized you..”

..to be continued..