To woods I knew, I took her there, took her there on her insistence. As we crossed the brambly threshold, I worried would she find the same creations as me. We wandered on around the fringes, a little deeper then until we stumbled upon a stump, its three rings telling of its sweet, bitter, surrendering past, before I had borne my axe on its offshoots of regression. There had been entangled neighbours, drooping through the eyes of its disease. She saw those trees as I now saw them, firm and harmonic, but the stump unsettled her, though never a word she said.
We trekked on, her sobered, me awkward, through youthful sombre and playful reckless age, before resting beneath the boughs of a giant of the forest. There I relived for her mystical journeys to my castle in the sky, before magic ebbed and sense commanded. She smiled at first, then mocked in jest at a foolishness she swore she had never risen to, before confessing that she too knew a forest of grace and broken branches, a place she said I seemed to understand. Though on inquiry, she looked out and softly said that there were corners of decay, and to those parts she must go alone for now. She looked then to the earth, before eyes rested in eyes and hands intertwined – guards broken, a guard stronger.