I carried a chair to the edge of the hill the way a woman carries a secret — carefully, with both hands, afraid to spill it before she's ready.
Below me, the city unravels like a sentence I've already read. Side streets threading into other side streets, then dissolving into the kind of quiet that swallows its own tail. The cars move through it all without permission asked. Each one carrying its one brief life, that small lit lamp of a story, burning until it doesn't.
I do not know where they are going. Perhaps I have already been there. Perhaps those roads were never mine to walk.
At my feet, the ants are tending to their empire. Butterflies do not explain themselves. A bumblebee moves through the clover with more certainty than I have managed in years. This — this — is the world without an audience.
I had forgotten what fresh air tastes like when you let it. A cool breeze came and I opened my mouth the way you open your mouth for water after a long, dry grief. There it is, I thought. There you are.
He stands behind me — the old one, the tree. I think he has been here longer than grief, longer than any name I could give him. I want to call him by a rune. Something Norse and heavy, something that sounds like memory and threshold and what holds the sky up. He doesn't need my naming. But I need the giving of it.
I wonder what he has seen from this hill. I wonder if he has watched a thousand women carry their chairs to the edge and sit down in their own becoming.
Teach me, I think. I am listening now.
The traffic does not know it is beautiful from a distance. Neither did I, for a long time, know that stillness could be chosen, that peace was not the absence of living but its fullest weather.
I am not going anywhere today.
I am here, beneath this ancient patient thing, watching the world move along its errand — and finding, to my own quiet surprise, that I am content.
The girl is back. She brought a chair.