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She stood in the water as if the water had asked her to.

The stream wasn’t deep—only enough to take the weight out of her legs and give it to the stones. The stones accepted it without comment. They had been doing that kind of work for a long time. The forest leaned inward, politely, the way people do when they don’t want to interrupt but also don’t want to leave.

Her dress was simple and honest about being wet. It didn’t pretend otherwise. Water darkened the fabric where it touched, and the fabric agreed to this arrangement. Nothing was trying to be symbolic. Everything was just happening in the order it found acceptable.

She closed her eyes, not to think, but to stop deciding where to look.

The river held her reflection, but loosely. It didn’t insist. When the surface shifted, her face became something else—longer, broken, briefly unrecognizable. Then it returned. This felt correct. Identity, she understood, was not meant to be a fixed address.

Leaves had caught in her hair the way thoughts sometimes do—without permission, without urgency. She didn’t remove them. The forest had made a small claim, and she saw no reason to dispute it. Ownership here was temporary and unambitious.

Upstream, something moved. Maybe a fish. Maybe a memory. The difference didn’t matter as much as it used to.

She remembered a time when stillness felt like failure. When motion was proof. When she believed that if she paused too long, she might be mistaken for something finished. But the river had taught her otherwise. It moved constantly and went nowhere in particular. Or maybe it went everywhere slowly enough to remain unnoticed.

Light filtered through the trees, untheatrical and exact. No beams. No revelations. Just illumination doing its job without commentary. Her skin caught it briefly and let it go, the way a thought passes through the mind without asking to stay.

She was not a goddess.
This mattered to her.

There were no instructions carved into the air, no hidden grammar behind the moment. Nothing needed to be interpreted. The forest did not require understanding—only presence, which was easier than she had been led to believe.

She lifted one hand slightly, not in greeting, not in farewell. Just enough to feel the air change temperature. The air responded by being air. This mutual restraint felt like respect.

If someone had come upon her then, they might have thought they were witnessing something important. They would have been wrong in an interesting way. Nothing important was happening. Something ordinary was happening without being rushed, and that made it rare.

Eventually, she would leave the water.
Eventually, the leaves would fall from her hair.
Eventually, the river would forget her shape.

But not yet.

For now, the world had paused—not dramatically, not forever—just long enough to remember that it did not need to perform in order to exist. And she stood there with it, doing the same.