There’s a certain kind of afternoon that lives in my head. The house is quiet, not in a sterile way, but in that gentle, upholstered quiet that happens when everything has been arranged just so. A pale linen tablecloth, slightly creased from the fold. A half-read book on the arm of a chair- something mid-century, European, and slow. There’s bread cooling on the counter and light falling through linen curtains in a way that suggests I’ve done something right. I’m wearing something long and soft. Someone is coming home soon.
This is not a memory. It’s more like an aesthetic projection: equal parts Instagram minimalism, 19th-century realism, and the ambient domesticity of an Edward Hopper painting. It’s Emma Bovary minus the debt. A woman alone in a house, not bored or frantic or tragic, but settled. A vision of domestic life where love is settled, and the woman is part of the furniture, not in a bleak sense, but in the sense that she fits. She belongs. A domestic still life where I am both subject and object: the one who folds the laundry, and the one who has been folded into the scene.
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