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There were very few houses in my neighborhood.

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At the beginning of the road stood Ông Tứ’s house. It sat far back, hidden behind coffee plants and a fence of yellow flowers. Every time I passed by, I stopped to breathe them in. I knew his name, but I had never seen his face. No one knew much about his family or what they did. Sometimes, out of curiosity, I pressed my eyes to the gaps in the fence, trying to see inside. Just a small wooden house. Doors always closed.

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There was something unsettling about it.

When the yellow flowers were not in season, I ran whenever I passed that house.

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One day, I heard his family had moved away. They had lived there for years, yet even when they left, I never once met any of them. The house was abandoned, swallowed back into silence.

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Next door lived Bác Năm and Bác Bốn. They were siblings and shared a garden. Their families often sat together on the porch drinking tea . Sometimes they visited Uncle Tranh’s house, but never ours. Occasionally, I ran into them or their relatives. I said hello; they responded with a nod—most of the time without looking at me, rarely smiling.

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Bác Bốn lived right beside us. He never spoke. I had never heard his voice. He paced back and forth in front of our house, hands clasped behind his back or tucked into his pockets, peering in and out, his face always stone-cold. Whenever I saw him on the road, I pretended not to notice.

Our houses were separated by a steel fence. He checked it often—whether it stood straight, whether it leaned toward his side. If it leaned even slightly, he would come complain to my father. That was the only conversation I ever knew him to have with my family.

We lived next to each other for years—neighbors, yet strangers. 

In a village that small, loneliness should not have existed. Houses stood close together. Everyone walked the same paths. Voices easily carried across gardens. And yet, there were long stretches of time when that tiny world felt hollow, emptied of people.

The adults were always busy—working, worrying, surviving. I was the youngest one, drifting on my own. During the day, when no one was home, I played alone. In the evenings, I sat on the veranda, my legs dangling above the steps, waiting for the sound of footsteps returning. Waiting for the hum of a bicycle. Waiting for a familiar voice.

Time moved strangely slowly. So slow that I felt as if I could see the shape of silence.

I played with my shadow.

At first, it was just curiosity—watching it stretch and shrink with the sun, bend when I bent, disappear when clouds passed. Then I began to speak to it. I asked questions. I answered myself. Sometimes I scolded it. Sometimes I whispered secrets I had no one else to tell.

The shadow never left me.

I befriended chickens, cats that brushed quietly against my legs, dogs lying in the dirt watching me with patient eyes, asking only to be touched. I spoke to flowers as if they could hear. I told rambling, shapeless stories to the objects around me—the doorframe, the teapot, the old broom leaning against the wall—as if they might remember me someday, when I was gone.

I could sit for hours watching eggs crack open, chicks stumble into the world on tiny legs. I watched worms curl in wet soil after rain, ants carry crumbs larger than their own bodies. I learned the language of stillness, because it was the only language that was always there.

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To the left lived Uncle Tranh’s family. They had many children, like us, all around the same age. My sisters played with his daughters. Phúc and Cường were close to my age, but they were boys. Sometimes they let me play with them. Sometimes they didn’t.

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To be accepted—to be like them—I sometimes dressed like a boy. Often, they only let me sit and watch. Sometimes I begged, and they allowed me to join. I played all the boys’ games—marbles, tin-can tossing, wrestling, cricket fights—and I was terrible at every single one.

Their games. Their rules. Every loss came with punishment: a flick to the ear, a slap to the palm, a knock on the head. I wanted to play, so I accepted it. Sometimes it hurt too much. I cried and ran home. That was why they didn’t like me.

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There was only one thing I was good at: flying kites in the field behind our house.

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We made kites from old notebooks. Mine was always the most beautiful—and it always flew the highest. That was why I loved summer, loved the dry days. Barefoot, holding the string, feeling its pull as the kite surged upward—I had never felt so close to flying.

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My village was small. Running beneath the kite, I wondered how far one could see from up there. Surely the world was much larger than this little hamlet. The wind slammed into my face. My feet sank into mud. But my soul rose with the kite, into that endless sky. Phúc and Cường didn’t care much for it. So some afternoons, I flew kites alone.

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Summer in the Highlands was breathtaking.

The sky stretched endlessly blue. At noon, the sun stood still overhead, the air thick and heavy. Behind our garden was a pond. Nothing felt cooler than plunging into it. None of us could swim. We chopped down banana trunks, threw them into the water, clung to them to stay afloat. The pond was deep. Adults strictly forbade us from going near it. But children do not always listen. The boys learned quickly. They only let me into the water when their legs were tired. By the time they could swim, I still could not.

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One day, my mother caught me. She dragged me out and struck me hard. My nose bled. She froze, staring at me in shock. It was the only time in my life she ever hit me.

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She apologised.
But I didn’t speak to her for days.
And she never let me practice swimming again.

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Sunny days was also when people appeared.

When Hải picked me up from kindergarten, I sat on the back of his bicycle, turning my head to look at Đức Mẹ Hill covered in blazing yellow wild sunflowers, my heart floating, humming the song my teacher had taught us that day. Year after year, I waited for summer, clinging to that image in my childhood memory.

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On weekends, when Thu was around, I felt just as whole. Following her into the eucalyptus forest to cut leaves for the coffee plants, I breathed in the scent of freshly cut grass and damp earth. Birds called. Wind moved through leaves. Thu worked and sang, her voice clear and high, blending with the birds.

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While she gathered leaves, I skipped around, chased butterflies, picked flowers, followed falling leaves, played with worms, crickets, grasshoppers. Those were my only toys—the ones my parents could never afford, but nature gave freely.

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Thu stacked the grass onto the bicycle and lifted me up to sit on top. I sat higher than her shoulders, swinging my legs, holding onto her, laughing out loud. My trousers turned green from the grass. Every time, I stared at that green for a long while, pressed my nose to the fabric, breathed in the scent one last time before she took the clothes to wash.

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​In March and April, when the coffee fields entered their season of bloom, my world turned dreamlike, like a painting come alive. White flowers burst everywhere, butterflies filled the sky, and brown bees worked tirelessly at the blossoms. In those days, I was almost never indoors, I lived on the roads, chasing butterflies, searching for the most radiant one, quietly following it until my small feet grew weary.

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Oh, sunny days. How I loved sunny days!

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Especially the nights when the electricity went out. Under moonlight, blackout nights were not dark—my village shimmered like a silver vase. The moon rose so close it felt almost physical, a presence you could sense. Moonlight spilled generously across the village, soft and tender, turning everything calm and unreal. On full-moon nights, the moon no longer hid behind clouds. It stayed there, quietly watching us from above.

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Those moonlit nights were, to me, the sweetest and most peaceful memories in my childhood.

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It felt as if, under the moon, everyone set aside their worries—no more counting rice in the jar, no more wondering whether the pig feed had finished cooking. All the children, of every age, boys and girls alike, gathered to play.

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Uncle Tranh’s yard became our playground—rope skipping, hopscotch, tug of war, herding ducks. We ran until our shirts were soaked with sweat. We laughed, we shouted with happiness. And for me, more than anything else, those were the moments when I always had a team, when I did not feel alone, when the rules were fair.

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Those nights, I went to bed smiling.

Those were the moments I felt complete.

Just having someone nearby made the world feel like a different place.

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But evenings in the Highlands were different.

Twilight came early and lingered too long. The sun slipped behind the hills, light draining away as if swallowed by the earth. Shadows stretched unnaturally. Cold arrived without warning. Smoke from kitchen fires rose thin and fragile.

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The village sank back into silence.

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One rainy season, a distant relative came to stay with Uncle Tranh’s family. He was tall and thin, with long hair and a beard. At night, he called us children over to hear his stories.

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We sat in the kitchen. There was no electricity—only an oil lamp on the table. He told us to sit close together. Very close. He spoke slowly, almost whispering, word by word. Goosebumps rose on my skin. I clutched Đông’s hand tightly, my nails digging into her palm, pain sharp—but neither of us dared make a sound. When the story ended, we held hands and ran home through the darkness. Twenty meters from Uncle Tranh’s yard to our house felt like twenty kilometers.

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Before leaving, he said one sentence that haunted us for years:

“When yin prevails, yang weakens.”

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There was a story of a young girl who died from cold. After death, she returned at night to check on sleeping children. If a toe was left uncovered, she pulled it—and turned it into ice.

As he said this, he grabbed my toe.

I screamed and burst into tears.

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From that night on, sleep became something to fear. I always tucked the blanket tightly around my feet—even in the heat of summer, even when sweat soaked the sheets. My toes were always hidden.

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And,

I stopped playing with my shadow. Shadows were ghosts now. After the ghost stories, darkness was no longer empty. It was crowded with shapes.

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Much later, when I moved to the city for university—where streets overflowed with people and lights burned bright—I reminded myself:

When life flourishes, darkness retreats.

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But back then, in that tiny village, all I knew was how tightly I clung to summer, to moonlight, to human voices.

And every morning I woke hoping it would be a sunny day—enough happiness to store away, enough to survive the coming rainy months.

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Just one day.

That was all I needed, as simple as that.