Years of Lead Set of 4

The years do not go away. They settle, quietly, into the stones of the piazza, into the folds of curtains, into the shadows that stretch across a park bench in the fading light. The places remain, unchanged to the casual eye, but for those who know, they hold something heavier. Not history, exactly, but the residue of a time when life felt precarious, when even the ordinary carried a weight. 
 
It is not in the loudness of events that the past lingers, but in the small things—the man at the newspaper stand, his fingers hovering just a moment too long over the pages; the way sunlight filters through a room, touching objects that seem to carry the burden of waiting; the faint smell of smoke that clings to a bench in the park, as though someone had just risen and left behind a fragment of themselves. 
 
These spaces were never meant to hold fear, but fear crept into them all the same. And though the world moves forward, these places cannot. The piazza is busier now, the room brighter, the park cleaner, but something is missing. The edges feel too sharp, the ease too shallow. The spaces are here, but their soul has shifted. 
 
We like to believe we have escaped the past, but it is always there, lingering at the edges. In the light that falls just so, in the quiet that feels too deep, in the objects that seem to remember more than they should. These places do not forget, even if we do. And perhaps that is their greatest strength: they wait, silently, for someone to notice, to feel the weight, and to remember.