Day One: A Sip of Water

I remember the room before anything happened to it.

But first, a sip of water. Moments of clarity build the greatest of kingdoms.

And now; Empty, white, still holding the shape of whoever lived there last. I had just moved in — a fresh start built out of an ending I hadn't fully accepted yet — and for a while, that emptiness was the only honest thing in the apartment. Everything else was still in boxes. The room didn't ask me to be anything yet, and some nights that was the only reason I could stand to be in it.

I've always looked at my life cinematically, so of course I looked at the room that way too.

Scene - An empty white room, lit by whatever light made it through the blinds, felt like…the warmest morning I could imagine — the kind that arrives after a long, uncertain night and asks nothing of you except to notice it. I sat with that feeling for longer than I probably needed to. I let the room stay empty because I didn't want to fill it with anything that wasn't…intentional.

I obviously had an imaginary road to journey. When the road is unclear, clean a room. That's logic. That was the plan.

Somewhere in that stillness, the idea for the rest of the apartment finally became visible. I saw it as a hut built high in a type of rainforest — the kind of place that exists mostly for safety, tucked above the noise, with its own weather and its own sound. Quiet raindrops. Jungle streams; a symphony of mystic winds and living breath. A secured system, but also one hell of a vibe. I thought about random uncharted parts of Brazil, and about the version of home Dorothy spent an entire movie trying to get back to. There's no place like home isn't a line to me — it's a direction.

So the bedroom became the hidden domain.

I wanted it to sit behind a green wall, the way a sacred hut or a tavern in a story sits just out of view until you've earned the walk toward it.

Botanical.

From the living room, you wouldn't know what was there and beyond. You'd have to go looking. A quest rather. And when you finally opened that door, it wouldn't be another version of the same place— it would be an explosion of color. Flowers, leaves, everything the empty white room had been patiently waiting to become.

A safe haven. A real treasure, but only for the person willing to walk the length of the hallway to find it.

That was Day One — not the day I moved in, and not the day the room was finally full, but the day the whole shape of a space became clear to me at once. Everything I've built in this apartment since has just been proof of that first idea. The room taught me that. It always does, if you let it stay empty long enough to listen.