meadow

Inside her, the household turned into geometry. Every worry, every urgent matter is not a thought or a work, but a hard, sharp-edged crystal slowly growing somewhere in the chest. When I woke up in the morning, there were already several of them. As the day wore on, they multiplied, coalesced into cold, spiky structures, until in the evening the whole interior turned into a mineral museum—orderly, logical, but lifeless and oppressive. She felt their weight with every breath. Love for children, duty to loved ones - this was the mortar that connected the spiky edges of the crystals. From them arose a strong, reliable structure, in the shadow of which she herself gradually disappeared.

That's how her days flew by, carrying out routine orders. Everything had sharp corners: the shopping list, the meeting agenda, even the phone conversation. The sounds were spiky, the colors as if they were covered with a layer of dry dust. Its interior landscape resembled the surface of the Moon - silent, sterile, harsh, fit only for these cold, rational structures to grow.

But sometimes the world, as if suddenly remembering an old, forgotten debt, simply burst into her eternally occupied hands with a gift. It happened without warning - a cello phrase revealed through an open window, a line in a book opened by chance, a combination of colors on a street poster. A moment of pure, undiluted beauty that does not fit into any geometric schemes.

And then the backlash started.

Fresh, pure air rushed inside her, and the crystals in her chest began to melt. Like ice touched by the spring sun. The sharp corners began to soften, turning into pure, cool water, which gravitated deeper, drop by drop hearing the thirsty earth of the soul. He washed away the accumulated bitterness.

Then the miracle began. Where the edges of the crystals had just starved, sprouts would sprout from beneath the moist earth. Fragile but persistent. The melody heard turned into long, flexible plant stems. The seen color spread out into a ring of unseen pattern. The word she read became a strange, fragrant spice that filled her entire being.

The whole inner landscape was changing. Instead of a mineral museum, a secret, ephemeral garden blossomed in it. The heavy silence would turn into a low hum, like bees gathering nectar. The dust settled, and all the inner colors became bright, pure, deep again. The outside world wasn't going anywhere - his demands were still on the table, but now there was silence between them and herself. Dense and alive, like the foliage of a lush garden, which absorbs all the noise and turns it into a quiet rustle.

She would stand in the middle of the room, washing dishes or folding laundry, but she was really wading through her inner meadow, her fingers touching the velvety petals. Worries became distant and insignificant. The stones in the pockets turned into seeds.

Indeed, the baby of happiness became the one who first managed to detect it by smelling the aroma of his own flowers.