The Clearing
In the deep woods, near a lake as smooth as obsidian, I find her.
A dense, old forest surrounds us, where the trees lean in like elders who’ve heard everything. And in the center sits a woman.
She is perched on a tree stump that has shape-shifted itself into a chair just for her…because of course it would. The forest knows her. The moss knows her. Even the smoke from her cig curls upward like it wants to stay near her a little longer. Everything is still and quiet, as if someone had pressed pause. The only movement is the smoke unfurling from her lips and a small dragonfly, wings humming in an unheard rhythm, resting on the left crest of her wooden throne.
She has that old-song energy about her — blues and tambourine, earth and incense — the kind of presence that makes young souls wander out of their chaos and sit at her feet without knowing why. I am no different.
I walk toward her, unsure whether I am arriving or returning.
When I reach her I sit at her feet, and the forest quiets even deeper, the way it does when something true is happening. She flicks the ash from her cigarette, and I watch it fall in slow motion.
Above our heads, the sky shifts like a living mural. The zodiac reveals itself, painted across the indigo sky like ancestral graffiti. Across the backdrop of silver-blue light, stars softly reposition themselves, constellations blooming open as if we had summoned them by name. Years of friendship stretch across the night as easily as us tracing the planets with our fingers, pointing out where Mercury danced in reverse, Aquarius pouring its wisdom back into the dark.
In her presence I begin to change, not into someone new but into more of myself. Younger me folds into older me, like layers of a story finding their order again. The girl I had been stays seated inside the woman I am becoming, both held in the space carved out by her steady, ancient knowing.
She remains exactly as she is, ageless and newly born, old as a hymn, constant as a flickering flame. Never young, never old. Always herself. She looks like wisdom wrapped in wool and cotton. A blues song made human. A root system that learned how to breathe air.
We talk.
Not loudly. Not eagerly. But in that soft way of people who have survived their parents, survived themselves, survived enough seasons to know when to whisper. Our words don’t fill the clearing; they lift and fall like embers.
We lean toward each other. Laughter rises — hers low, throaty, familiar — and the moment it escapes, the forest catches it. The sound carries like wind through leaves long after our mouths close.
We trade stories.
Mothers and shadows.
Fathers and love.
The strange tenderness of abandonment.
The way grief grows like moss over time.
And above us, the sky continues its slow shift.
We point upward like children again, naming planets and transits, arguing softly about retrogrades, laughing at the sky’s old games.
The fire between us crackles, throwing gold onto her face. She looks beautiful, the kind of beautiful that has nothing to do with youth and everything to do with presence. She looks like someone who never belonged to a clock.
When the wind brushes through the clearing, I realize a truth:
Some people aren’t from here, not really.
They’re bridges.