I have no beginning that anyone remembers, only a point when I was once soft enough to be shaped. Since then, everything has settled around me, slowly, one ring at a time.

I sense years before they are complete. Winter does not arrive as something new, but as a weight I already recognize in my branches. It settles into me, makes me quieter, keeps me in a form that is a little more taut than summer’s. Each circle a winter that did not disappear, each change a summer that remained, each layer a reminder that time does not pass me by, but through me.

She does not come in a hurry. 
I can feel her slowing down before she even reaches me,
as though the place itself draws the pace from her steps. 
The wind moves through me as it always does, 
but now there is something that was not there before – 
a kind of stillness that does not come from me. 

She places a hand against my bark. 
She does not stay long. People rarely do. 
But when she leaves, she leaves behind 
something that is not physical and yet not entirely absent. 
I carry it onward through the wind, 
through the cold, through the shifting light. 
And I understand that every encounter, however brief, 
can become a layer if it is allowed to remain long enough in the silence afterward.

I don’t know why I stop. Just a slight shift in my step, as when the body decides before the mind. I place my hand against the trunk. It is more an impulse than an action. The surface is uneven, alive. I remain there a little too long. Not because I decide to, but because leaving feels harder than expected. As if the time around me has grown a little thicker, a little less willing to let go.

And when I finally remove my hand, nothing clear happens. The tree stands as it did before. Yet I still have the feeling that something has shifted—not in what can be seen, but in how I will remember the place—as a thin layer of stillness that has settled somewhere between what I experienced and what I did not have time to understand.

I move on, but the place does not leave me entirely.
The tree remains where it has always stood.
And yet it feels as though we have shared a silence
that stretches beyond the moment we stood in.
As though the same time, just for a brief while,
moved more slowly between us both.

We both continue on, each in our own way. 
There is no direction we share,
no common thought to hold on to.
But something in the way we have been near each other
makes the world feel not quite as it did before.
A place where time does not separate us,
but lets us remain within the same quiet breath,
for a little while longer.