The Garden That Held Me Together

I had come back to the city with a suitcase full of silence, the kind that settles in your chest after you've spent too long pretending you're okay. The apartment was bright, but it didn't hold me. So I walked until my feet remembered how to feel the ground, and this little path opened up—palm fronds brushing the sky like slow green breaths.
I stood there in the white lace, feeling foolish and free all at once, and turned when a voice called my name from somewhere soft and warm. It was him again, not with grand words, but with the quiet way he looked at me as if I were something precious he'd been searching for in every crowded room. The sunlight on my skin felt like his hand.
Maybe healing isn't a single moment, I thought, smiling into the leaves. Maybe it's just being seen—truly seen—while the whole world breathes around you, gentle and unhurried, wrapping you up like a cup of hot cocoa on the coldest day.

Editor: Coco