This is not about Nick Drake, not really. It’s about a place that barely exists anymore and a moment that slipped away while no one was looking. Rangoon, 1948. The British are leaving, and independence is arriving, though no one yet knows what either will look like. 
 
The streets hum with anticipation, and the trees hum with insects louder still. In a house that belongs neither to the past nor the future, a young man sits with a notebook he will not fill. He listens instead: to the soft rustle of leaves, to the distant call to prayer, to the emptiness of a world preparing to change. Even here, long before the songs, there was something waiting. 
 
Decades later, people will search for him in his music, calling it fragile, melancholic, haunting, forgetting that fragility and beauty are not opposites but siblings. But this moment, this garden, this boys, not haunted. It’s simply quiet. Quiet enough to hear the beginning of something too fleeting to hold. The veranda creaks under shifting weight. 
 
Beyond its edges, the city carries on. A vendor shouts. A car horn breaks the stillness. The boy writes nothing, because what can you write when everything you see is already gone? Rangoon was never his, but it held him briefly. It shaped him in ways even he couldn’t have guessed. 
 
Decades later, his music will carry the weight of places like this, where the air feels thicker than time and every sound echoes louder than it should. This moment, he boy on the veranda, the city beyond, will remain unheard, like an echo in a place that never stops moving