Three Children

Three Children

I Am. I Am. I Am. Project. | Mixed Media on Canvas | 16x20 | 2025

The house is quiet. Not the quiet of a place abandoned, but the quiet of people who have learned to move around each other without leaving footprints. I watch from the edges, the way one might watch a photograph fade, aware that every gesture is rehearsed and every glance calculated.

Three children occupy the center of it. I do not name them; it is enough to observe. Their movements are small and precise, their voices measured. They carry the weight of the rooms around them with a sort of inherited grace, as though the walls themselves have taught them how to walk lightly over tension. I do not enter. I cannot.

I have learned to witness, to keep my distance. It is not deliberate. It is necessity. I remember what happens when I cross the threshold: the heat of temper and the way ordinary afternoons shatter into episodes I am ill-equipped to survive. It is easier to remain outside to catalog the traces left behind: half-finished meals, the subtle tilt of a chair where someone sat and then left too quickly, or the pattern of light across the floor.

They do not know I watch. Perhaps they never will. Perhaps they already sense it in the edges of their memory, like a shadow one notices only when the room is empty. Their laughter drifts to me in shards that glint, unexpected, and then vanish. It is not comforting. It is not cruel. It simply exists, a reminder that the world continues in motion, whether or not I am part of it.

I remember the Sundays. The light that fell through the windows then seemed permanent. You could trust it, as you might trust the alignment of stars, and yet it never stayed. The house hummed with an energy I could not name, a tautness that made every small sound impossible to ignore. I learned quickly which noises were harmless and which carried the promise of upheaval. I learned to weigh my own presence, to measure my breathing, to slip into the spaces that were not claimed by anyone else.

Now, in the quieter moments, I trace the same rhythms from outside the frame. They do not know how carefully I note the way one child shifts their head when they do not understand, or the way the smallest gestures signal both surrender and defiance. I remember moving like this once too, with a caution that left no room for error. But then, my caution was deliberate; theirs is instinct, unshaped and unguarded, yet perfectly attuned.

I see them gathering in the central space, their motions choreographed by some invisible script. I hear their voices, low and clipped, speaking in a cadence that is both natural and enforced. I am aware of how much of life is noise, and how little of it is listened to. I listen. I watch. I record.

It is strange to live at the edges. Sometimes I imagine stepping fully into the room and becoming part of the geometry of this quiet household. And sometimes, I imagine leaving altogether, dissolving into a background so neutral that my presence is imperceptible. Between these imaginings lies the truth: I am neither fully absent nor fully present. I am the witness, the one who sees the subtle shifts and knows their significance.

The air is thick but unremarkable. No scents cling to it, no hints of anything past, except what is carried in memory. I watch a hand lift, brush hair from a forehead, and return to its task. A foot taps lightly in small rebellion contained within this quiet universe. I see them, these three, and I think about the work of observing. How much one can know without touching. How much one can feel without speaking.

In the half-light, their shadows stretch across the floor in angles that do not belong to me. They carry forward, and I carry backward, tracing the broken moments that have shaped me, noting the delicate design of a household that does not belong to me, that perhaps never has. 

And so I remain. Outside. Watching. Witnessing. Each movement, each pause, each faint intonation of voice is a story I catalog, a record of existence that will survive even if I do not intervene. There is no moral in this act. No salvation. Observation, and the strange calm of knowing what others pass by, of carrying what others discard from memory.