the girl who followed the quiet

In a far-away land where the wind carried stories more faithfully than people did,

there lived a girl who believed new beginnings were meant for braver souls than hers.

Her house was small and slightly crooked,

leaning the way tired things do when they’ve held too much.

Behind it, she kept a garden where the flowers grew

in shy, uncertain directions —

towards shadow instead of sun,

towards quiet instead of colour.

She loved them for it.

They made sense to her.

One dawn, after a night of restless weather,

a thin, trembling line of light appeared across her garden path.

It wasn’t bright.

It wasn’t sure of itself.

But it was there — waiting, almost politely.

So she followed it.

The light led her past the river where she once let go of someone she wasn’t ready to lose,

past the bridge where she’d learnt how fear feels in the body,

past the market where the world was always too loud for her softness.

The further she walked,

the less certain the light became.

It flickered.

Dimmed.

Returned.

But it never quite disappeared.

At the edge of the land,

in a place even the wind seemed to hesitate,

the light gathered itself into a soft circle on the ground.

Inside it lay a seed —

small, unremarkable,

the kind of thing a person might step over without noticing.

After all that distance,

all that hope,

she felt something pinch inside her.

This?

This was the beginning she had been led to?

Still,

she carried it home in the quiet way she carried most things.

She planted the seed in the darkest corner of her crooked garden,

the place nothing had ever chosen to grow.

She watered it without expectation,

spoke to it without realising,

and waited without meaning to.

Days passed.

Then weeks.

And then, one morning,

a single shoot broke the soil —

straight, luminous,

as if it had been reaching toward a sun she could not yet see.

It grew where nothing ever grew.

It grew toward a life she hadn’t learned how to live.

And standing there,

barefoot in the softened earth,

she understood something gentle and devastating at once:

Not every beginning arrives with certainty.

Some ask you to follow the quiet anyway.

Some ask you to walk with doubt in your pocket,

and hope in your hands.

She brushed the soil from her palms,

exhaled the fear she had mistaken for truth,

and let herself feel it fully —

the quiet, undeniable fact

that she was beginning again.