I must have been five.
Maybe a little older, but not much.
The memory has no date, only weather.
It was winter.
Thick winter.
The kind of snow that doesn’t fall — it settles.
Quietly.
Like it’s remembering something.
We lived then in a small town you wouldn’t find unless you were looking for it, tucked between hills that didn’t quite qualify as mountains and fields that faded into forests. A town with one shop, two buses a day, and houses that all looked like they’d been poured from the same grey mold.
Our apartment was in one of those low, blocky buildings built in the old socialist style — square, sturdy, and uninterested in aesthetics. The walls were thin, the radiators loud, and the floors made that particular hollow sound only worn parquet knows how to make.
But it was warm.
And quiet.
And ours.
I remember sitting on the windowsill with my legs pulled up under me, resting my chin on the cold glass. Outside, everything was white. The trees, the ground, even the clothesline across the yard. It was the kind of snow that made the world feel like it had been erased and drawn again — slower this time.
No internet.
No screens.
Not even a TV in our flat that day — it was broken, or someone else was using it.
Just the snow.
And me.
And the silence.
My mother was folding laundry nearby. My father was out, probably clearing snow off the old Yugo parked downstairs. I didn’t speak. I didn’t want to break the spell. I just watched.
A cat passed below, black against the white.
A man carried firewood to a shed.
Two children across the road rolled snowballs that would never become a snowman.
Time moved differently then.
Not slower — just wider.
Each moment had more space in it.
I didn’t know it then, but I was learning something important.
That you can sit without needing to do anything.
That you can observe without reacting.
That you can feel full — deeply, warmly full — without having anything new or exciting happening.
I didn’t need to share the moment.
Didn’t need to capture it, or explain it, or understand it.
It just was.
And that was enough.
Years later, when the internet arrived, it felt like magic.
It made the world bigger, faster, louder.
And it gave me things I love — voices, music, friendships stretched across oceans.
But sometimes I forget the earlier magic.
The kind you find in a small apartment, in a town no one talks about,
with snow outside and nothing else going on.
The Stillness Beneath the Signal
When people talk about life before the internet, they speak of boredom.
Of waiting.
Of not knowing.
But that’s not what I remember.
I remember attention.
I remember noticing things.
The way snow curved around the edge of the bench.
The way silence felt heavy, but not sad.
The way a moment could stretch out so long it felt like you were inside it.
That’s the life before the internet.
And it still exists.
Even now.
It exists when you let a moment be enough.
When you watch something without needing to document it.
When you choose not to reach.
When you move only when it’s time to move.
It’s the difference between reacting and responding.
Between flinching and seeing clearly.
Between motion and meaning.
That day on the windowsill, I didn’t learn a fact.
I learned a posture.
An orientation toward the world.
One that says:
Sit.
See.
Wait.
And know — not everything needs your hand.
life 