I live in a house where there are more books than furniture. They stand on shelves, lie on windowsills, sometimes on the floor beside the bed. Guests ask whether I have read them all. No. But I know where each one stands.
A room with one window
I write in a small room with one window. A desk, a lamp, a chair that creaks. Nothing more is needed. I have tried working in cafés, on trains, in beautiful bright studios. Everywhere something got in the way. Here nothing does, except myself, and I learned long ago how to come to terms with that.
In the mornings the room is so quiet that you can hear the tea growing cold. I sit down, open the notebook, and for a while I simply sit. This is not laziness. It is a door you must wait for until it opens.
The books on the shelves are silent at this hour. But their silence is different from that of an empty wall. There are voices in it that I once needed.
A space that remembers
It seems to me that a house remembers what has happened in it. Not the walls, of course, but something between them. The pages that were rewritten here. The conversations that lasted here until morning. The long evenings when nothing worked.
Stories are not born in the head. They are born where they are allowed to be quiet.
I do not know how many more books I will write in this room. Perhaps one. Perhaps none. But I know for certain that I will not leave here while this chair still creaks.
Stories come to those who know how to wait. And home is the best place to wait, among books that have already waited for their own.
