Vines Bury Footsteps

There was once a path here.

I am certain of it—not because I saw it, but because I felt it. A knowing that rises from the soles of your feet, where the earth holds memories even as time wears them thin. And yet, now, there is only moss. Vines curl across the forest floor in soft, winding braids, weaving over roots and rocks as though the forest itself is stitching closed a wound long forgotten, its silence a quiet mourning for what once was.

They say the forest forgets nothing. That’s only half true. The forest remembers, but it chooses silence. Where once footsteps echoed, there is only hush now—green and growing. The air is thick with quiet reverence, the kind that makes you speak in whispers even when you are alone.

I knelt where the underbrush seemed to shift, brushing away leaves to reveal the faintest shape of a stone—flat and worn smooth, like it had been walked upon. Perhaps a step. Perhaps a marker. But the vines had already begun their work, wrapping it in soft green tendrils, as if to say: this was once, but is no longer.

Somewhere deeper in the wood, they say, a traveler once walked this way every day. No one remembers their name. Only that their footsteps were soft, and that the forest grew quieter after they were gone. No one saw them leave. No one came looking. But over time, the path grew faint. Then faded. Then gone.

It is not an act of cruelty. The vines do not erase. They tend. They hold what has been left behind, cradling it in silence, covering it gently as dusk covers the day.

Perhaps the forest knows we are too quick to forget. So it forgets for us—slowly, sweetly, with green fingers and leaf-laced lullabies.

So I leave the path behind, though I never truly found it. The vines bury what we leave, not to hide it—but to keep it. And that, I think, is a kind of remembering too.