This is enough, but it’s not

The light filters through the window, soft and golden, spilling onto the table where a chipped mug sits beside an open book. The pages smell like dust and memory, their edges curling slightly from years of being thumbed through, read, and abandoned. Outside, the world is quiet, the sky stretched taut like a canvas, pale and expansive. You sip the tea. It is warm, bitter, grounding.

This is enough.

The house is small but holds what you need: a bed that sighs under your weight, a chair that remembers the curve of your spine, a patch of garden where wildflowers bloom without asking permission. The fridge hums softly, its shelves sparse but sufficient—milk, eggs, bread. A bowl of fruit on the counter, oranges and apples, their colors muted in the fading light.

You tell yourself it’s enough.

There is no one here to interrupt the silence, no voices weaving through the air, no footsteps pressing the floors. This solitude feels like a gift most days, a reprieve from the tangle of other people. You read, you write, you watch the birds gather in the trees. Sometimes, when the wind moves just right, it carries the sound of children laughing somewhere far away.

And yet.

You lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling, the weight of the blankets both comforting and oppressive. The quiet isn’t always peaceful; sometimes it sharpens, a blade carving into the edges of your thoughts. You think of all the things you don’t have, all the voices you miss, all the moments you let slip through your fingers.

This should be enough. You’ve told yourself that a thousand times. You have what you need, don’t you? A roof, a warm meal, books to lose yourself in. You have the sun on your face and the stars above your bed.

But it isn’t.

There’s a hollowness that no amount of light can fill, a restlessness that whispers in the spaces between breaths. You catch glimpses of something else—something more—in the way the clouds shift at dusk or the way the ocean looks just before a storm. It’s in the laughter that echoes down the empty streets, in the stranger’s face you almost recognize.

It’s in the quiet ache of longing you carry like a stone in your chest.

Enough is a line you can’t seem to cross, a promise that feels half-kept. It is the steady rhythm of your days, but not the music you yearn to hear. It is the tea in your hands, but not the taste of something sweeter.

And so you live in this space, balancing between gratitude and hunger. You wake each morning and remind yourself to breathe, to look at the sky, to taste the warmth of your tea. You tell yourself that this is enough.

And maybe, someday, it will be.