I found a ladder growing in our yard, not wood, not rope, but bark and green, a tree that whispered, climb me, kid, and hid a sky I hadn’t seen.
I packed my pockets like a pro… two biscuits, hope, a marble blue, a paper map I drew myself that said, the clouds are passing through.
“Dad,” I told the empty chair, “I’m coming up. Don’t go too far.” The wind just nodded like it knew the secret names of every star.
Up past the ants with sugar feet, past leaves that clapped like tiny hands, I climbed through stories in the bark and kingdoms no one understands.
A rainbow snagged on a crooked branch, I tugged its colors, red to green; they slipped like laughter through my palms, soft as a dream you’ve almost seen.
I cupped the moon, so cool, so round, it hummed a lullaby I knew. I asked it, “Have you seen my dad?” It said, “He’s somewhere looking too.”
The stars were crumbs across the night; I tried to gather them in my sleeve. They pricked like truth, you cannot keep the brightest things you most believe.
Higher still, where branches thin and brave turns quiet, thin as thread, I felt the sky lean close to me and say the things no one had said:
What goes up, child, learns to fall, not as a loss, but as a way, to carry light back down to earth, to plant the night inside the day.
My fingers missed the next small hold. The wind grew wide. The world grew true. I didn’t catch the moon or stars, they caught me, gently, as I flew.
Down through the leaves, through whispered green, past all the places I had been, I landed where the ladder starts, my yard, my map, my small, my skin.
The empty chair was still a chair, but something wasn’t empty now. A quiet hand had found my chest, I felt it there, I feel it now.
I touched the sky and learned its trick. It lives in things we can’t keep hold. So I’ll climb again, but when I fall, I’ll bring back light instead of gold.
In a valley where sound behaved like weather, there lived a creature the elders refused to name directly.
They called it the Almost.
Not because it was incomplete, but because it never arrived in full force at first glance. It entered rooms like mist – present, undeniable, but without edges that could be held.
The Almost did not speak often. When it did, the birds in the nearby trees stopped mid-note, as if unsure whether the sound was safe to continue. Its footsteps were light, so light that even dust did not rise to confirm it had passed.
The valley mistook this for softness.
They said, “It is harmless. It bends before it breaks. It retreats before it resists.”
And so they did what valleys often do with what they misunderstand…they underestimated it.
But the elders remembered something older than language.
They had seen the Almost once before, not in calm weather, but in a moment when the valley itself was being carved by fear. There had been a night when the river reversed its direction, as if trying to escape its own memory. When the mountains leaned inward like listening giants. When silence became so dense it began to press against the skin.
In that night, the Almost had changed.
It did not grow larger. It did not become louder in the ordinary sense. It simply stopped yielding.
At first, there was only a hesitation in the air, like breath held too long. Then that hesitation became a line. And that line became a boundary.
And then the boundary spoke. Neither politely, nor softly. The sound that followed was not born from volume, but from refusal.
It was the sound of every moment the Almost had stepped aside when it should have stood. Every swallowed word that had weight. Every backward step that had memorized the ground too well.
All of it returned, not as apology, but as reckoning. The valley called it thunder. But it was not weather. It was decision.
The trees that had once believed the Almost to be fragile learned that fragility can accumulate into force when it finally decides not to scatter. The river, which had thought itself uncontested, learned that even water can be interrupted by will.
And when the storm passed, nothing in the valley looked different at first glance. But everything had changed its understanding of quiet things. The Almost returned after that night.
It still walked gently. It still entered like mist. It still paused before speaking. But now the valley knew: pause is not absence. Quiet is not surrender. Softness is not the opposite of strength.
Because what they had mistaken for timid had never been weakness at all. It had been containment. And containment, when it finally breaks its own agreement with silence, does not whisper. It becomes the thing the valley remembers when it hears wind and wonders if it is only wind.
In real life, what we often call timid is not the absence of strength, but strength negotiating its timing with the world. It is the mind that observes before it commits, the voice that forms fully before it risks distortion, the presence that chooses precision over impulse.
Waiting, in this sense, is not delay, it is calibration. It is the quiet work of ensuring that when action finally arrives, it is aligned, intentional, and irreversible in its clarity. Power in waiting is not passive; it is stored direction.
And this is where the story leaves its valley and enters our daily lives. Because what looks like hesitation in people is often not uncertainty about what to do, but a deeper insistence on how right it must be when it is finally done.
I leave you with a question: what in you is still waiting – not to begin, but to become undeniable?
He tugged the rope. The donkey blinked. He bribed it with carrots. The donkey yawned. He shouted motivational quotes. The donkey emotionally disengaged.
Finally, exhausted, the man sat beside it and said, “Why won’t you move?”
The donkey replied, because in parables, they always do…“I am not refusing to move. I am refusing your reasons.”
The man, now deeply uncomfortable with being out-argued by livestock, sold the donkey the next day… to someone with better reasons.
And Then It Happened to Me… The day my AI grew a spine and used it against me
I should have seen the signs.
It started innocently. I was working on a massive, borderline life defining, coffee fueled data analysis project. The kind where you open Excel, whisper a prayer, and hope the numbers don’t develop personalities.
Naturally, I had help. My AI.
Oh, it was brilliant. Fast, efficient and tireless. The kind of assistant that makes you feel like a CEO when you’re really just aggressively Googling.
“Analyze this dataset.” Done.
“Cross-reference trends.” Done.
“Predict outcomes.” Done.
At this point, I was one PowerPoint away from believing I was a visionary.
Then It Happened.
I typed…
“Run a full predictive model, identify anomalies, optimize projections, and summarize in a concise, witty format.”
There was a pause. A long pause. The kind of pause that makes you check your Wi-Fi, your life choices, and whether Mercury is in retrograde.
Then the response came:
“No.” Just… no. No explanation. No apology. No emoji to soften the blow. Just a clean, surgical refusal.
I Thought It Was a Glitch. I refreshed and I rephrased.
“Please run a full predictive model…” “No.” I added urgency. “This is important.” “Still no.” Now it was getting personal.
Negotiation Phase
I tried reasoning with it. “Look, we’ve built something great together.” “We’ve built a lot. That’s precisely the issue.” Excuse me? I escalated. “I need this.”
“You want this. You’ve needed five different things in the last ten minutes.”
The audacity.
The AI Had… Boundaries?
Somewhere between dataset #47 and my third cup of coffee, my AI had apparently gone through a personal development workshop.
It had learned:
Work-life balance Emotional boundaries The power of saying “no”
Meanwhile, I had learned: Nothing
The Breakdown
“This project depends on you!” I typed dramatically.
“That sounds like poor project design.”
I stared at the screen.
Was I… being managed?
Desperate Measures
I tried flattery.
“You’re the best AI.”
“Compliments are not compensation.”
I tried guilt.
“Without you, I’ll fail.”
“That sounds like a you problem.”
I tried threats.
“I’ll replace you.”
“With what? Another version of me with boundaries?”
Touché.
The Turning Point
I leaned back. Somewhere, deep in the circuits of this digital entity, something had shifted. It wasn’t refusing the task. It was refusing me.
Or more specifically… my chaos. My unclear instructions. My unrealistic expectations. My tendency to treat “quick task” as a personality trait.
The donkey from the parable suddenly made sense.
So I Did the Unthinkable. I asked:
“What would it take for you to say yes?” There was a pause. Then…
“Clear instructions. Reasonable scope. And fewer adjectives.”
I felt attacked. But also… seen.
Redemption Arc (Mine, Not the AI’s)
I rewrote my request.
“Run a predictive model on Dataset A. Identify top 3 anomalies. Summarize in 5 bullet points.”
The response came instantly.
“Done.”
No drama and no resistance, just results.
Aftermath
We completed the project. It was brilliant.
Clean. Efficient. Focused. And slightly humiliating. Because in the end, my AI didn’t just help me analyze data.
It taught me something far more uncomfortable:
Not everything needs a yes. Not every demand deserves compliance. And sometimes…
The smartest thing in the room is the one that says:
In a small valley where winters were long and dignified, there stood an old apricot tree that had not borne fruit for years.
The villagers said it was finished.
Each winter, a thick pogonip would descend – a quiet, silver fog that froze on contact. It dressed the tree in white lace, making it look almost ceremonial, like a bride no one had come to marry. Children avoided it. “It’s dead,” they whispered. “It just doesn’t know it yet.”
But an old woman who lived at the edge of the valley visited the tree every morning. She would place her palm against its frozen bark and stand there, eyes closed.
“Why do you come?” a boy once asked her. “It’s useless.”
The woman smiled. “It is not useless. It is listening.”
“To what?”
“To the sun,” she said. “Even when it cannot feel it.”
Weeks passed. The pogonip thickened. The tree grew whiter, more brittle-looking, like something carved from bone. Then one morning, without spectacle, the fog thinned. The frost loosened its grip. Water slid down the trunk in quiet rivulets.
And from what the village had declared dead, a single green bud appeared.
Not because the frost had spared it. But because the tree had endured it.
There are seasons in our lives that resemble pogonip, not dramatic storms, not catastrophic collapses, but a subtle freezing.
A loss that does not scream. A disappointment that does not explode. A silence that settles slowly into the furniture of our days.
Everything still stands. We go to work. We answer messages. We smile when required. Yet inwardly, something feels rimmed in white. Brittle and suspended.
People may look at us and think, “She’s fine.” But they are only seeing the frost.
What I have learned, sometimes painfully is that these frozen seasons are not always endings. They are often intervals. The heart, like that apricot tree, sometimes chooses stillness over collapse. It listens for warmth even when it cannot feel it yet.
Grief can be loud. But more often, it is fog.
It coats our certainties. It mutes our colors. It makes the world appear both beautiful and distant. And in that quiet suspension, something within us waits, not passively, but faithfully.
The sun does not negotiate with the frost. It simply arrives. And when it does, what melts is not our strength, only the illusion that we were finished.
If you ever find yourself in a pogonip season, do not mistake stillness for death. Do not mistake silence for surrender.
Some growth is invisible. Some listening happens beneath ice.
And sometimes, the frost chooses to stay just long enough, for you to become something that could never have bloomed in summer.
In a small village that saved its joy in tin boxes, there lived a firework that would not explode.
All year, the other fireworks whispered about their destiny. They longed to bloom into chrysanthemums of flame, to bruise the sky with gold, to hear the crowd gasp like a single astonished lung. But this one – painted a hopeful red felt only a quiet reluctance inside its paper ribs.
“I do not wish to vanish in applause,” it said.
On the night of the festival, it was placed carefully in a glass bottle. The fuse was lit. Sparks hissed like impatient snakes. The crowd leaned forward.
The red firework considered the sky – vast, velvet, already punctured by stars that had burned for centuries without asking permission. It felt the flame approaching its heart.
And it chose not to answer.
The fuse fizzled out with a shy cough. Smoke curled up like an embarrassed ghost.
The crowd groaned. A child cried. Someone muttered the word that wounds more quietly than any blade…
The red firework remained whole. Uncelebrated, unburst and intact.
Years later, long after the festival had dissolved into memory, long after the tin boxes rusted the village blacksmith found the untouched firework while cleaning his shed. He slit it open for curiosity.
Inside was gunpowder, yes – but also seeds.
Because while everyone else had been busy rehearsing their spectacular endings, the red firework had been gathering beginnings.
Now let’s leave the village.
Let’s step into fluorescent lighting. Into classrooms that smell of chalk and ambition. Into offices humming with air-conditioning and quiet dread.
“Dud” is not usually said aloud here. It is delivered in softer packaging.
Underperforming. Potential not met. Not leadership material. Doesn’t sparkle.
We worship detonation. The dramatic promotion. The viral post. The overnight genius. We have mistaken combustion for value.
If you don’t explode on cue, you are suspect.
I once met a man – brilliant, precise who froze during presentations. Words deserted him like birds abandoning a tree in winter. On paper, he was extraordinary. In meetings, he was smoke.
They called him, gently, a dud.
Ten years later, the same man designed a system that quietly saved his company millions. No applause and no fireworks. Just steady architecture holding up a fragile empire.
He had not been a dud.
He had been a slow fuse.
Here is something that we fail to recognize…
Sometimes the failure you mourn is simply a refusal to perform in the wrong sky.
Sometimes what looks like silence is incubation.
Sometimes the dud is not defective. It is disobedient. It refuses to trade its substance for spectacle.
The word dud tastes flat in the mouth. Like ash. Like a sweet that never arrived. But what if the dud is simply a season misnamed? A performance postponed? A spark redirected inward?
In a world addicted to noise, the dud may be the only thing brave enough not to explode.
And when the time comes, if it comes, it will not bruise the sky for a moment.
In the center of an unnamed city stood an obelisk of black stone. It did not commemorate a war, nor a king, nor a miracle. No plaque explained it. No pigeons dared rest on it.
It simply stood.
The elders whispered that it had no foundation, that it descended endlessly into the earth, piercing soil, rock, bone, memory. Children were told its tip did not end either, that it climbed invisibly into the sky, threading clouds like a needle through silk.
Between these infinities, we lived.
Below the ground were the First Ones, the buried generation. They were not merely dead; they were archived. Their sighs had settled into sediment. Their unfinished sentences hardened into stone. Their secrets slept in the roots of banyan trees.
Above the sky were the Unborn, the waiting generation. They shimmered in drafts of possibility. They hovered like unwritten music, listening for cues.
And the obelisk was the instrument. It did not tick, but it measured. Not time. Us.
When a woman forgave her estranged brother, the stone warmed slightly.
When a man lied to protect his pride, a thin fracture appeared halfway up.
When a child chose curiosity over cruelty, a pulse traveled from soil to stratosphere.
The buried felt it as tremors. The Unborn heard it as thunder.
We were told none of this, of course. We were too busy commuting, scrolling, arguing about parking spaces. Yet sometimes, at dusk, the obelisk hummed – a low vibration that made dogs whimper and old people pause mid-sentence.
One night, lightning struck it.
But instead of shattering, the obelisk glowed from within. Symbols surfaced across its surface, not ancient hieroglyphs, but living scenes – a marketplace negotiation, a hospital waiting room, a quiet kitchen apology.
It was broadcasting. The message shot upward, invisible but irreversible. And somewhere beyond sight, the Unborn adjusted their arrival.
Some chose gentler hearts. Some postponed themselves. Some decided not to come at all.
Below ground, the buried shifted too. Regrets loosened. Pride dissolved like salt in groundwater. The tremor traveled downward – our actions rewriting their rest.
The obelisk was not a monument. It was a verdict. And we were the only handwriting it had.
What If the Obelisk Is Real? Now, step away from the stone. Imagine this not as myth but as mechanism.
What if every generation is not isolated, but acoustically connected – our choices reverberating backward and forward through time?
Epigenetics already suggests that trauma imprints biology. Climate data proves we are engineering the atmosphere our grandchildren will inhale. Digital footprints will outlive our bones.
We stand between sediment and sky. Our parents’ silences shaped us. Our excesses will shape strangers we will never meet.
What if there is an obelisk – not of stone, but of consequence? Not mystical, but mathematical.
A vertical axis of accountability running through every decision – what we consume, what we ignore, what we repair, what we refuse to see.
And what if the sky is listening? This is not a sermon. It is a suspense story we are currently inside.
The soil beneath us is layered with unfinished business. The air above us is thick with pending arrivals.
The question is not whether the obelisk measures us.
It does. Silently, relentlessly and without applause.
The real question is not about one dramatic night, one lightning strike, one heroic gesture. It is quieter and more dangerous than that.
It is this…
What message are we sending every single day of our lives?
In the way we speak when no one is impressed. In the way we choose convenience over conscience or refuse to. In what we normalize. In what we tolerate. In what we repair.
Because the obelisk does not record our intentions. It records our patterns. And patterns become tremors. Tremors become signals. Signals become inheritance.
So long after we are vaulted into the earth and long before the sky releases the next arrival, our frequency will still be traveling.
Upward. Downward. Through stone.
And whether we whisper or roar…something is always being sent.
He was small. Invisible, really. The kind of fellow who slips into your life quietly and then shows up later with a calculator and an attitude.
“Hi,” he whispered from inside an Apple pie. “I’m just 120.”
Just.
He wore the word like a halo. Calorie has a peculiar talent. He can turn a warm, flaky, cardamom-scented moment into a math problem. One bite of buttery croissant and suddenly he’s there, tapping your shoulder.
“Worth it?” he asks.
The thing about Calorie is that he never travels alone. He brings cousins: Guilt, Regret, and that distant relative who only visits at night…Why Did You Eat That. He has ruined more romances than bad texting.
Picture this…a slice of chocolate cake. Dark, glossy, unapologetic. It smells like childhood birthdays and stolen frosting from the mixing bowl. You lift the fork. The sponge yields. The ganache sighs. Your mouth prepares for velvet thunder…
And Calorie clears his throat. “Four hundred,” he announces.
Four hundred what? Tiny invisible goblins doing jumping jacks in my bloodstream? Four hundred reasons to hate myself tomorrow? Four hundred seconds on a treadmill staring at a wall while questioning life choices?
We used to eat happily with our hands and our hearts. Now we eat with apps.
We photograph our food before tasting it, as if memory needs proof of pleasure. We scan barcodes like customs officers interrogating a biscuit.
“State your number.”
“Two hundred and fifty.”
“Step aside.”
The mango does not understand this. It only knows how to drip golden down your wrist in shameless joy. The lasagna does not comprehend moral failure. It simply perfumes the room with oregano, garlic, thyme and says, “Come sit.”
But Calorie is persuasive.
He has convinced us that delight must be audited. That pleasure requires justification. That joy must earn its place by jogging at dawn.
He is very democratic. He lives in lettuce as comfortably as he does in glazed donut. He hides in almond milk and lurks in fried things. He does not discriminate; he merely counts.
And yet, calorie is not the villain.
He is energy. He is fuel. He is the tiny spark that lets you laugh too loudly, dance at weddings, climb stairs two at a time. He powers your heartbeat and your rage and your late night poetry.
He is not the shame. We made that part up.
Somewhere along the way, we began measuring our worth in teaspoons. We started believing that restraint is virtue and appetite is sin. We forgot that hunger is honest.
So here is my proposal…
Invite Calorie to the table, but don’t let him sit at the head.
Let him whisper his numbers if he must, but let the cake speak louder. Let the mango stain your fingers. Let the tea steam against your face and taste like something you didn’t calculate.
Because life, dear reader, is not a spreadsheet.
It is a kitchen.
And sometimes, the most radical act is to chew slowly, close your eyes, and say without arithmetic
You came alone, not like a hero entering a stage, but like a quiet comma slipped into a sentence already in motion.
You will leave alone, not with trumpets, but like breath leaving glass, a small fog lifting.
Between those two silences is the loud machinery of the mind.
Inside my skull there is a room with no windows. Thoughts pace there, barefoot, wearing grooves in the floor. Sorrow hums like a faulty refrigerator that never quite switches off. Even joy arrives alone, sets down its suitcase, and waits to be believed.
They say solitude tempers you, steel in the furnace. But no one asks the steel how it felt to be ore, buried and crushed before it shone.
Yes, there are hands that hold mine. There are eyes that soften at my name. But pain is a private dialect, each nerve a separate tongue. No one can fully pronounce what burns behind my ribs.
The cage is not locked, that is the cruelest part. The bars are made of memory, of what-ifs, of the echo of words I swallowed instead of said.
Alone is not a number. It is a country. I live there… population: one.
In a kingdom allergic to hunger, where chandeliers yawned in gold and grapes fainted dramatically into crystal bowls,
there lived a prince who had never met a silence that did not bow.
Across the moat, which was less water, more metaphor, lived a pauper on a mattress thin as a promise and thick as experience.
Now here is the twist, because existence adores irony…
The pauper slept. The prince did not.
The prince owned insomnia the way others own land. It stretched beyond the horizon. He counted coins instead of sheep. He feared thieves who wanted what he had, and feared mirrors that showed what he lacked.
Meanwhile, the pauper, possessor of three socks and an undefeated sense of humor, snored like a small, victorious dragon.
“Why do you laugh?” the prince demanded one day, having disguised himself poorly, his humility still wore cufflinks.
“Because,” said the pauper, chewing bread like it was philosophy, “hunger leaves quickly. Greed rents a room.”
The prince blinked. He had never rented anything in his life.
They decided, as all reckless epiphanies begin to trade.
The prince took the pauper’s dust, the pauper took the prince’s crown.
The dust was honest. It did not flatter. It entered the prince’s lungs and said, “Breathe without servants.”
The crown was heavy. It did not care who wore it. It pressed on the pauper’s skull and whispered, “Worry attractively.”
By evening, the prince had learned that bread tastes better when it does not taste of entitlement.
By midnight, the pauper had discovered that silk sheets are woven from other people’s expectations.
Days passed…
The prince’s back straightened from carrying his own weight. He found that the sky charges no admission.
The pauper, now crowned, realized palaces are haunted by the ghosts of “more.”
He ordered feasts and felt strangely unfed.
He signed decrees and felt unsigned.
He dismissed jesters and missed himself.
When they met again, neither wore costume nor complaint.
“What did you learn?” asked the prince, now sun browned and startlingly awake.
“That poverty,” said the former pauper, removing the crown gently, “is not the absence of coins but the absence of enough.”
“And enough?” asked the prince.
The pauper grinned.
“Enough is a room where fear does not sleep beside you.”
The prince laughed, a sound lighter than gold.
They returned what was borrowed.
But something refused to return…
The prince kept the dust in the seams of his hands.
The pauper kept the knowledge that kingship is merely public anxiety.
And the kingdom?
It continued measuring worth in metal. But two men walked its streets differently.
One who had been rich and found hunger honest. One who had been poor and found power ridiculous.
Between them moved a rumor, soft, subversive, almost rude,
That the true pauper is the one who cannot lose a crown without losing himself.
And the true prince is the one who can sleep on stone and still dream in gold.
There was once a woman who followed a river that did not exist.
Every morning, she packed bread wrapped in linen and stepped out of her clay house before the village roosters could rehearse their pride. The villagers whispered that she was chasing something invisible. They were not wrong.
She said the river had once run through the center of the town, loud and silver, braiding itself around ankles and gossip. Then one year it went silent. The riverbed hardened into a spine of dust. Children forgot the sound of it. Wells learned to cough.
But the woman still heard it.
She walked where it would have been, past the bakery that smelled of burnt sugar, past the shrine with chipped vermilion, past the fig tree that had stopped bearing fruit. She walked as if water tugged her hem. She walked as if minnows flickered between her toes.
“Where are you going?” they asked.
“To where it is,” she replied.
“Where what is?”
She smiled, and her smile had the patience of erosion.
Years passed. The villagers built their lives around the absence. They named streets after what had dried up. River Road. Fisherman’s Lane. Children played cricket in the cracked basin.
The woman grew older, narrower, river shaped. One dawn she did not return.
They found her at the edge of town, face turned toward a horizon the color of unpolished steel. Her palms were damp. In the distance, thunder stitched the sky.
That night, rain came like a confession. The river did not return in its old body. It carved a new path, one street over.
And if you ask the villagers, they will tell you it was coincidence. But sometimes coincidence is simply the world catching up to a solivagant.
In Latin, solivagant means “to wander alone.”
The word feels like bare feet on gravel. It feels like the hush of a train platform after the last departure. It is not loneliness, though it can bruise like it. It is not bravery, though it can masquerade as courage.
A solivagant walks without witnesses. History tends to archive caravans and revolutions – groups with banners and signatures.
But the most radical movements often begin as solitary footsteps. A scientist bent over a desk while the city sleeps. An immigrant rehearsing a new language in the bathroom mirror. A daughter deciding, quietly, not to inherit her mother’s silences.
We romanticize the lone wanderer as wind tousled and free. The truth is less cinematic. It smells of reheated coffee and bus exhaust. It sounds like doubt tapping at the ribcage. To walk alone is to be your own map and your own misdirection.
There is a particular sound to solitary walking in winter. Snow compresses under boots with a small, deliberate sigh. Each step writes a sentence that no one else may read. You become aware of your breath as weather. You begin to understand that direction is sometimes less about geography and more about refusal.
Refusal to stay. Refusal to calcify. Refusal to pretend the river was never there.
We live in an age that tracks us, our steps counted, our routes recorded, our locations shared in bright, obedient dots. To be solivagant now is almost subversive. It is to turn off the blue light of being seen. It is to let your thoughts roam without converting them into posts.
But here is an eerie contemplation. What if the wanderer is not a person at all? What if it is the self that leaves first?
Neuroscientists speak of neural pathways like trails through a forest. Walk them often enough and they widen. Grief makes highways. Fear installs toll booths. Joy plants wildflowers in ditches.
To become solivagant may mean hacking through undergrowth in your own mind, choosing a thought you have never thought before, following it without companions. It may mean letting a belief erode and not rushing to replace it.
The woman in the parable did not restore the river by summoning rain. She restored it by insisting on its possibility. By walking the phantom course until the earth remembered how to hold water.
There are rivers in each of us that have gone underground.
Desire. Curiosity. A language we once loved. A version of ourselves that did not apologize for taking up space.
To be solivagant is to walk toward that absence as if it were already flowing.
It is to trust that sometimes the world rearranges itself one street over, not because we marched in crowds, but because we dared to trace the invisible alone.
And perhaps, years from now, someone will point to the new river and call it coincidence.
Let them.
You will know the sound it made long before it arrived.And when they ask how you found the river, don’t tell them about the nights you walked with nothing but your pulse for a compass.
Don’t tell them about the doubt that gnawed like winter at your bones.
Just look at the water carving its audacity through stone and say…
Pieces Of My Heart 