The House
Daily writing promptIf you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?
I had a dream once, that I was sitting, resting in a cosy alcove of walls empanelled with wood, with wooden chairs and tables with comfortable cushions, smoke from an incense stick hanging heavy in the air and on the nose. There was a gentle breeze, a whisper really, as the air managed the barest of ventilating drafts between a door at the back of the alcove, into the rest of the house cut into the mountain, and the heavily forested slope it looked out on, where the rain poured almost every hour of every day. From my chair and wrapped in a few blankets, I looked at the skyscrapers just a few leagues off, adorned in gaudy neon colours, imagining the lives of people moving inside them… There was a pungent sort of bliss between the pervasive sooty odour and the immutable petrichor, the sort that comes with equal parts contentment and knowing there's a place out there, certainly outside the house, where one would be sodden, stepping in muck, swatting at flies, and just plain miserable. That house, holding fort between the alcove and the world, that's where I'd like to live.