Just maybe.

So when you find me
standing beneath an Appalachian oak,
feet buried in moss,
listening to a creek
carry yesterday downstream—

don’t ask me
what I’m doing.

I’m learning.

How to bend
without disappearing.

How to carry history
without drowning in it.

How to lose something
and still grow.

How to let the mountain
make me softer
without making me small.

And the trees?

They lean over the bank
like old Appalachian grandmothers,

watching,

knowing,

whispering—

Honey,
we have buried things
you wouldn’t believe.

We have survived fires.

We have survived axes.

We have survived men
who looked at mountains
and saw only what they could take.

And still—

every spring,

we turn green.

Every.

Damn.

Spring.

So maybe that’s the lesson.

Maybe healing
was never supposed to look
like forgetting.

Maybe healing looks like a tree
growing around the place
where the blade went in.