My parents just died.
Car crash.
And for the first time since their disappearance, I’m back at their house.

A house is never just a house. It’s a theater. A fossil. A crime scene.
Sometimes, it’s all of the above — depending on what version of yourself opens the door.

I stop at the base of the staircase, one hand resting on the banister, unsettled by a feeling that rises in me like an uninvited guest.

“Is this nostalgia?”

Most likely.
Nostalgia is one of the headliners of the emotional pathologies — the Lana Del Rey of the limbic system.
Once considered a quaint affliction of those far from home, it’s now a fully weaponized faculty of the central nervous system. A conjuror. A set designer.
It doesn’t store memory; it re-stages it, with better lighting and selective silence.
It doesn’t remember — it reimagines.

In doing so, nostalgia becomes less about what happened, and more about what could have been beautiful — even if it wasn’t.
It’s more gifted than the best filmmakers, and more dishonest than the best writers.
It turns recollection into forgery.
Elegant forgery.
A counterfeit so perfect, even the forger forgets it’s fake.

That’s why, as I begin to climb the stairs, I realize I’m not ascending anything.
I’m walking into a version of myself that only existed here.
And only when I was still partially unmade.

By the time I reach the landing, the regression is complete.
I’m seventeen.
At my most serene.
At my most scripted.
Youth, when it isn’t tragic, is at least operatic — and I, of course, thought I was the libretto.

This hallway — broad, square, dimmed by the evening — is still haunted by the idea that puberty chose me to manifest itself.
It was here that my parents, in a scene I can replay frame by frame, gave me their reluctant blessing to leave.

“Certain things, they should stay the way they are.
You ought to be able to stick them in one of those glass cases and just leave them alone.”

They were seated together on a velvet sofa the color of radioactive mustard — a color that gave their hesitations a certain royal gravity.
Across from them, I sat in a silk-covered armchair, performing detachment like it was a family duty.
My father looked at my mother, searching for a cue. She looked at me, searching for the end of something.
And then, with a smile that knew too much, she said:

“The day you become a student, you can do it.
You can move out.”

And when I did get in — Computer Science, because irony is always wearing a white lab coat — she handed me a key and a scribbled address.
It was the Unirii Boulevard apartment.
She said: “It’s yours.”

I moved in at the end of summer. And from that moment on, this house became a relic — one I visited less and less, each time with less of myself intact.

There are four bedrooms on this floor — one for each wall of the hallway.
Mine is the first on the right.

It’s not the biggest.
Not the prettiest.
But it’s closest to the stairs — a tactical advantage, if your specialty is disappearance.

And it has one more secret: it faces west.
So while the rest of the house collapsed into shadow, my room became a cathedral of amber.

“La terre est bleue comme une orange.”

Just like now — a golden slice of light cuts under the door.
I open it. Push it back against the wall.

Roger Deakins would weep.

The sun, in its theatrical descent, dresses the room in tones usually reserved for memory.
I take a step in.
And there it is — the truth of the room:

Its clock stopped in 1997.

Proof?
That Pentium II on the desk.
Frozen. Like everything else:

The white wardrobe to my right — so massive, it might qualify as a guest room.
The oversized bed.
The twin nightstands, carved like regret.
The custom white bookshelf, stretching wall to wall like an exhale.
The beige curtains, still drawn across the windows, the narrow balcony door, and the desk that once held all my unknowable futures.

Sometimes, grief is a place.
And sometimes, it’s a password.
Today, it’s both.