Cold Wonder

Time Space Warp #48

Hey—It’s Toffer.

I left.

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Estimated read time: 2 minutes

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Deadlines climbed the walls.
Noise bred more noise.
The heat pressed against my chest until breathing felt expensive.

Manila didn’t feel like home anymore.
It felt like drowning in slow motion.

I thought maybe the cold would save me.
Maybe silence could teach me how to stay standing.

It didn’t.

The place I found wasn’t silent.
It was humming.

It didn’t run on clocks.
It ran on rhythm.
The kind that doesn’t shout.
The kind that waits.

Inside the workshop, everything moved like breath underwater—
slow, deliberate, inevitable.

Someone was carving the leg of a wooden horse like it mattered.
Another shaped what looked like a sleigh, outlines chalked on the floor.
Small hands tied ribbons, adjusted wheels, placed things gently on shelves.

Songs floated through the rafters, too light to carry the weight I brought with me.

It made me restless.
Made me angry.

Where was the urgency?
The panic?
The desperate race that meant something important was happening?

He found me.

Not tall.
Not loud.
But when he entered the room, the air changed—
like the walls recognized him before I did.

He didn’t say anything.
Just smiled—small, knowing—
and pressed a heavy mug of coco into my frozen hands.

For a moment, the warmth almost hurt more than the cold.

I stayed, because I didn’t know what else to do.

Days blurred all the way to December.
The place didn’t sprint.
The people didn’t scramble.
They moved like they had already won something I didn’t know how to name.

And under it all, I started to hear it.

Not silence.
Not noise.

Something else.
Steady.
Low.
Alive.

It wasn’t ambition.
It wasn’t pressure.

It was joy.

Not the fleeting kind.
Not the firework kind—brief, bright, and gone.

Real joy.

The kind you grow by hand.
The kind that doesn’t ask permission to exist.

And one night, as the last light bled out of the sky, the bell rang.

Everything moved.
Not in chaos.
In celebration.

The workshop burst into life—
wooden wheels clicked into place,
ribbons flew from shelves,
laughter spun through the beams like smoke catching sunlight.

They weren’t saving anything.

They were lifting it.

Wrapping joy in cloth and wood and quiet wonder.
Passing it hand to hand.
No rush.
No noise.
Just rhythm.

It wasn’t timing that made it magic.
It wasn’t urgency.
It wasn’t fear.

It was the joy that had been humming there all along,
waiting for its moment to break the surface.

When I flew home, the city was still there—
hot, crowded, urgent.

But somewhere under the noise,
I carried something quieter.
Something stronger.

A hum.
A reason.
A season.

Your Friend in Time,
Toffer