“Written for my friend Eudosia, with memories of our walks through Tbilisi.”

The carved wooden balcony had been watching over the street for more than a century, its intricate Georgian patterns weathered now into a soft silvery gray. Eudosia pressed her palm against the wooden wall of the building and felt the familiar vibration of the city—cars rumbling over cobblestones, voices echoing between the narrow lanes.

She had visited this place often while living in Tbilisi. Now, she stood watching a brass key in the door hole, its metal darkened by time, older perhaps than the Soviet era itself. Quietly, almost as a prayer, she whispered: “Listen to what the house tells you.”

The first time she came here, she believed it was only her poetic imagination giving life to the building. But years later she realized the house truly spoke—in the groan of settling timber, in the sigh of the wind slipping through the window frames, in the soft percussion of rain on the terracotta roof tiles.

She remembered the family who once invited her in for tea: the elderly woman and her grown son who lived on the ground floor. The old woman, born within these walls and never having left them, served as the building’s quiet historian. “These old houses,” she had said, her voice steady, “they remember everything. The stones hold our stories.”

Later, sitting in the courtyard, Eudosia felt that truth settle within her. This house did more than shelter bodies—it held memories, dreams, and the unbroken threads that bound one generation to the next.

That evening, back in her hotel room, she lifted a glass toward the darkening city and whispered a toast in Georgian: “To the stories that live in stone.”