The way the light hits the forum right now

It’s 23:00, and I just finished cleaning a fragment of a mosaic from a villa near Ostia — tiny tesserae, mostly green and rust. The lamp above me is low, and the screen glows like a hearth. I keep thinking about how little we know about what people actually did in their homes at night, centuries ago. Not prayers, not rituals — just sitting. Reading. Waiting for rain. Maybe that’s all there ever was.