✨her heart✨
She walked the dark forest he led her through, where the cypress knees rose like old bones and owls marked the hours with their cries. His love was a snare, a net cast in shadows, and she, bound by hope, followed his trail.
He carved for her a life that any woman might dream of…a hearth fire glowing, fields planted straight, a home where laughter could take root. But these were hollow blueprints, words without breath, for he never intended to fulfill them.
Not because he was a bad man, but because he did not know how to be loved, for he did not love himself. He loved from a place still bleeding, a boy wounded long ago, not understanding that even the bear, fierce in claw and muscle, can also be gentle.
Still, she bled on the thorns of his choosing, and she stayed until the night itself taught her feet to carry her away. Now she stands on the far shore, her moccasins pressed in river mud, watching from a distance.
She sees him there, heart sagging like a storm-broken willow, still bowing before the crooked idols he built with his own hands. And she wonders… does he think of her still?
Does her name rise in him like smoke from pinewood, or does she come only as a thorn, a ghost rustling through reeds at dusk? Does he turn over the thought of who she was to him, and what he lost when he let her go?
She can no longer dream of them together… not because the dreams have left her… but because she forbids them to return. Too sharp is the ache. She lives with questions the wind cannot answer, fantasies that never rooted, dreams that will never bear fruit.
Yet a sting remains…that he could have been more. The man she saw dwelling behind his eyes, the man he never chose to become.
No matter how wide a path she carved for him, with love, with sacrifice, with belief… he always chose another route.
That sting smolders still, quiet as a coal under ashes.
And yet, the old ones say forgiveness is not forgetting. It is the setting down of a stone so one may walk farther. So she laid hers at the river’s edge, and watched the ripples carry it away to the place where water meets sky.
Above all, she hopes joy will find him. Not the false mirages of men, but a happiness real and bone-deep… the kind that loosens the shoulders, and frees the spirit.
For she is free …as the heron rising from the marsh, as the pine that bends but does not break, as the river that remembers its own way home.
And that is forgiveness.