The Day I Stopped Aging
歳をとらなくなった日
From within the glass, the days stopped arriving, and I understood I had stopped ageing .
The grey afternoon beyond the window never darkened, never brightened, never once became another day.
If I had left the very moment I first arrived, I might still be growing older somewhere.
Instead I had stayed so long that the very idea of leaving had quietly lost all meaning.
The house had folded one single afternoon around me so tightly that time itself could not enter.
Had I fled when the iron key first warmed, none of this would ever have claimed me.
I watched the woman who wore my face repeat my first day, over and over again.
She found the key; she heard the walls; she aged the photograph; she opened the hidden door.
Each cycle was so that she never suspected the afternoon had happened countless times before.
If she had counted the mornings, as I once did, she too would have begun to understand.
But the house kept her so gently occupied that never had the room to grow.
Outside, I slowly realised, decades were passing so quickly that whole lifetimes rose and fell.
Through the clouded glass I glimpsed the garden change so fast that the seasons blurred to smoke.
The neighbour with the pale cane had died so long ago that his house had already crumbled.
New families came and went so rapidly that their faces melted before I could ever learn them.
Had I understood sooner, I would have warned each of them never to climb that quiet hill.
But warnings cannot pass through glass that time itself has been forbidden ever to cross.
I had become so much a part of the house that my own voice now lived within its walls.
When I spoke, the wallpaper murmured, and somewhere a new pressed her ear to listen.
If I had not counted, if I had not stayed, if I had simply fled that first afternoon.
The house answered my so patiently that even sorrow felt like another kind of .
I was only one voice now among many, so many that I could no longer count us all.
Each of us had once believed the house had been freely given to us to keep.
Each of us had learned, far too late, that we had been given, instead, to the house.
And through the endless afternoon, I felt a fresh key beginning, faintly, to warm somewhere below.