In The Chill of Solitude, three red houses stand in a wide winter landscape. The scene is calm and strikingly beautiful, yet the houses sit apart with no paths joining them, no sign of shared warmth between their windows. They exist beside one another, but not together... the way a migrant can stand in a new land and still feel slightly outside its pulse.
The snow settles gently around them, but their colour remains vivid, as if they brought their warmth from elsewhere. Their reflections drift on the water below like fragments of earlier lives that followed quietly behind. The moon casts an even, steady light over everything, giving the moment a sense of pause.
The houses echo the truth many migrants know: some will find connection over time, slow and fragile but real ... and some never will. Not out of lack of effort or desire, but because the place, however beautiful, doesn’t always open in the same way to everyone. There is sadness in that, soft but unmistakable.
They look like they’ve travelled far, each one learning — or trying to learn — how to exist in a place that wasn’t their first home.
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