The Hidden Room Above the World

I saw him—

a man built from thunder and grief—

boarding the walls of his home

against a world unraveling in fire.

His hands,

cracked with fear and purpose,

lifted his wife and child

into the attic womb of silence—

a room with air,

with light,

with waiting breath.

They stayed,

as dust settled like prayers

on the beams of broken time.

They stayed,

as he bled into the earth

to keep their names alive.

The house changed hands.

Stolen.

Desecrated.

Forgotten.

But she,

the daughter grown from ash and lullabies,

walked back through shadows.

She found the house,

abandoned,

whispering his name through rotted floorboards.

She paid in full.

Not just in coin—

but in memory,

in strength,

in the vow her father died keeping.

“Mamá,” she said,

“it’s ours again.”

And the mother—

wrinkled by time but radiant in love—

wept,

not for what was lost,

but for what survived.

I was not her.

Not him.

Not them.

But I felt it.

Every word in Spanish

etched into my soul

like a language I once knew

before birth.