The thread continues. If your heart feels like following, these words are waiting. Thank you for walking with me this far. ******* When the dawn streaks pink across the horizon the frozen tree begins to sprout again soon the flowers will bloom and time moves once more Still, my love dwells and this grief remains /// In this city of restless streets and harbor lights, the days blurred into one another. Mornings rose over the water, the sun spilling fire across the horizon, but even the most breathtaking sunsets could not reach me. I woke, worked, commuted, smiled where I was expected to, and returned each night to an apartment that felt more like a waiting room than a home. My colleagues clapped when I earned a promotion, my friends teased me about my growing collection of books, and my mother said she was proud. I nodded, I laughed, yet it never settled inside me. I went on dates sometimes. Dinners with kind men who told their stories, who walked me home with careful courtesy. For a while, I let myself pretend I could belong. I leaned into someone’s warmth and allowed myself to believe I might start again. But mornings always betrayed me. The light was sharper, colder, reminding me that no touch, no fleeting sweetness could ever compare to the wind stirring the flowers or to his eyes meeting mine beneath that sky where sun and moon once stood together. There were nights I pushed myself out of the apartment, saying yes to invitations I once would have declined. One evening, a close friend gathered a few of us, and I went, if only to quiet the silence waiting at home. The room brimmed with easy chatter, glasses clinking, the hum of familiar stories. And there he was. He did not compete with the noise. Instead, he carried a calmness that softened it. When he spoke, it was about a book he had read long ago, his words measured, deliberate, as if he had turned them over carefully before letting them go. I caught myself listening too closely, drawn not by expectation but by the quiet steadiness he seemed to hold without effort. That was the night I met Sam. And yet, memory still lived everywhere, in fragments. A faint scent of wildflowers on a passing breeze, a wind that stirred the curtains like petals, the soft glow of evening, all of it brushed against me, pulling me backward without mercy. Even the most ordinary nights, with the pale glow of the moon above the city, cut through me with their echo of a world forever beyond me. A rustle of leaves along the pavement, a patch of weeds tucked between the cracks in the sidewalk, a stranger’s laughter, a painting of flowers in a café, or the tug of my scarf in the wind whispered something I could not hold, a reminder that the garden lingered, just out of reach. Sometimes, without meaning to, I drifted. My hands stilled, my smile lingered at nothing. Friends asked what I was thinking. I only laughed softly and shook my head. The truth was simple. I was not here. Not fully. Half of me lived in this city, and the other half remained caught in the garden that refused to fade. Dreams do not wound the heart like this. They are not meant to linger, year after year, refusing to let go. And yet I still dream, sometimes tender, sometimes unbearable, and each time I wake, the ache grows sharper. The garden feels farther away now, as if it has already chosen to close its gates to me. I once believed the story was not finished. That somewhere, the stars or the wind would open a path back. But the years keep passing, and the silence only grows heavier. More and more, I wonder if I have been waiting for something that will never return. And so I keep moving forward, or at least pretending to, carrying only the faint echo of petals, sunlight, and the memory of wind through flowers. A reminder that once, in another world, I belonged. End of Part 7 Part 6 https://ift.tt/X7Fdmvi ©️M.