The sun slowly rose above the horizon, gently awakening the village as it almost always did on Sunday mornings.
Mila woke up, yawning softly as she stretched beneath the sheets. Still half asleep, she turned around to face the place where her husband would normally be sleeping.
Only this morning, he wasn’t there.
His side of the bed was empty.
She opened her eyes a little wider and frowned.
“Eric?” she called softly.
No response.
Yawning once more, she pushed the sheets aside and glanced at the clock.
7:30 a.m.
“Why is he up this early on a Sunday?” she quietly wondered.
She grabbed a jacket that was lying within reach, slipped it on, and stepped into the hallway.
The house was quiet.
As she made her way downstairs and approached the kitchen, she finally saw him. Eric was sitting at the kitchen table, leaning forward over several small pieces of paper scattered across it. He was so focused on writing something down that he hadn’t even noticed her entering the room.
“Honey?” Mila asked as she walked towards him.
He didn’t respond immediately.
Curious, she picked up one of the notes lying on the table.
Only then did Eric finally look up.
“Oh! Good morning, sweetheart,” he said, slightly startled. “I didn’t want to wake you, so I came down here.”
Mila nodded, still looking at the piece of paper in her hand.
“What does ‘Hector and Elisabeth are now in a relationship’ mean?”
Eric looked at her for a moment before a small smile appeared on his face.
“Something that’s been in my head for the past few days.”
Her curiosity growing, Mila looked at some of the other notes scattered across the table. There were names, places, short sentences and fragments of ideas. Individually, they didn’t seem to mean very much.
But together, they appeared to be becoming something.
Something that looked remarkably like a story.
She looked back at him.
“Are you writing a story?”
There was genuine wonder in her eyes.
Eric shrugged and smiled.
“Perhaps. I don’t know yet. It might turn into something. Or it might not. Who knows?”
Mila smiled.
“I didn’t know you wrote.”
She glanced down at the notes once more before looking back at him.
“But I think I finally understand where you’ve been all those times you had that dreamy look on your face.”
Eric laughed softly.
And for the first time, Mila wasn’t worried about those quiet moments anymore.
She finally knew where her husband had been.
He had been somewhere inside his own imagination.
And this ordinary Sunday morning, suddenly turned out to be not so ordinary after all.