Still Us

She noticed it when she opened the calendar to check a dentist appointment.

June was empty.

Not unusually so–there were still birthdays marked, a work deadline, a reminder to renew the car registration–but the block that usually took up a week near the end of the month wasn’t there. No highlight. No penciled note in the margin. No question mark hovering beside a place name.

They didn’t say anything about it that night. Or the next.

Later, when she went to the hall closet to put away the sleeping bags, she noticed how the fabric still held the shape of the last trip. The nylon resisted her hands at first, springing back before settling. Dirt was worked into the seams. A faint smell of smoke lingered–wood and damp earth–something that never fully washed out no matter how carefully she cleaned them.

She knelt on the floor and pressed the air from them slowly, leaning her weight forward until the bags flattened beneath her palms. It took longer than she remembered. Or maybe she was just paying closer attention. The zipper teeth caught once, then slid free. She smoothed the creases as if precision might keep them relevant.

The stove was still clean from the last time she’d packed it away, wiped down and dried before being stored. The fuel canister beside it was half full. The tent poles stayed strapped together, the elastic still taut. Nothing was broken. Nothing had been declared unusable. Everything was intact in a way that felt increasingly beside the point.

They had always taken turns planning. One of them chose the place–the trail, the park, the stretch of land that still allowed tents. The other handled the details: permits, food, routes, weather windows. They switched roles each year without discussion, a rhythm that had once felt endless, something they assumed would outlast them.

This year, the rhythm had simply paused.

She closed the closet door quietly, as if not to wake something that was already listening.

She told herself it was temporary. Everything was temporary now. They would wait until things clarified. Until advisories changed. Until access reopened. Until next year.

They had met this way, after all. They had learned each other’s habits on uneven ground–who walked ahead, who stopped to look, who noticed weather turning before it arrived. He had proposed on a ridge where the air thinned and the view made it impossible to imagine enclosure. She still remembered how quiet it had been, how vast.

That wasn’t gone.

But it no longer extended forward the way it used to.

She didn’t realize he was grieving until he said it that way.

They were sitting on the floor, backs against the couch, the window cracked open just enough to let the evening cool the room. The light outside had softened, turning the glass faintly reflective. He had his laptop open between them, angled toward himself, the screen casting a low glow across his hands.

He scrolled slowly, more slowly than he needed to. She could tell by the way his fingers paused, then moved back again, as if the sequence mattered. These weren’t the photographs he usually showed other people. No summits. No wide views. Just the in-between moments he’d always insisted were harder to capture. Her boot resting on a log. Steam rising from a pot before it fully boiled. A stretch of trail where the light never quite behaved.

He lingered over one taken just before dusk, the frame tilted slightly, the horizon not quite level. She remembered the moment–not the image itself, but the pause that had come with it. The way they’d both stood still, listening, as if something might announce itself if they waited long enough.

“I thought we’d have more chances,” he said, not looking at her. “Out there. That’s how I know I’m still us.”

The sentence landed between them without urgency. It wasn’t a plan. It wasn’t even a question. It was the kind of statement that assumed continuation as a given.

She felt it register immediately–not as disagreement, but as recognition. She’d stopped counting on that assumption without noticing when it happened. Not because she’d decided against it, but because she’d learned to keep her expectations smaller, closer to what could still be managed.

She wanted to say they would. That they’d figure it out. That next year was still possible. But the words felt irresponsible in her mouth, like promising space they no longer controlled.

“We are,” she said instead. “Still us.”

He nodded, but she could feel the difference between agreement and consolation. He closed the laptop after that, not abruptly, but with care, as if the sequence deserved an ending even if the story didn’t.

In the weeks that followed, the narrowing showed up in small places first.

A notice arrived about permit renewals, the dates shifted forward without explanation. Temporary Adjustment, the subject line said. She read it twice, then flagged it to return to later. When she did, there was already another message threaded beneath it, clarifying that access would be reviewed on a rolling basis, a phrase that had begun appearing everywhere.

She started seeing it in other places, too. Trail closures extended without reopening dates. Advisory language that no longer included timelines, only conditions. Until further notice. Pending assessment. Subject to change.

None of it sounded final. That was the problem.

She kept track of these things the way she always had–quietly, methodically. She made notes in the margins of emails. Copied dates into a separate document. Compared updates across regions, noticing how often the same phrasing appeared, even when the circumstances were different. It felt less like planning and more like inventory.

When she mentioned it to him, she framed it as information, not conclusion. He listened, nodded, asked a few questions. He didn’t argue. He trusted her with this part of their life the same way she trusted him with others.

Still, she noticed how his attention drifted back to the photographs afterward, as if language had already failed him.

At night, when she lay awake, she found herself running through sequences she hadn’t intended to revisit yet. What came first. What could wait. What depended on access, on stability, on assumptions she no longer felt comfortable making. The future hadn’t closed.

It had compressed, folding in on itself a little more each time something was marked temporary.

She didn’t tell him that part.

It occurred to her then–not as longing, not as urgency, but as arithmetic. They had always agreed they would wait. Not because they were unsure, but because they were careful. They wanted time together first–time to walk long distances without obligation, to move through the world at the pace that made sense to them. When they spoke about children, it was never as an alternative to that life, but as an extension of it. One day, they would bring someone with them. they would teach them how to read weather, how to pack light, how to notice when the ground changed underfoot. It had never felt like postponement. It had felt like preparation.

Now the order of things was shifting. Waiting no longer meant choosing later. It meant risking that later would no longer belong to them. She didn’t know whether she wanted a child now. She only knew that the conditions under which they had planned to decide–access, health, time, permission–were dissolving. The future they had imagined hadn’t disappeared. It had become conditional.

She did not tell him this. Not because it wasn’t shared, but because there was nothing to negotiate yet–only something to recognize.

Later, after he’d gone to bed, she opened her computer.

The file was still there, exactly where she’d left it. Folders nested inside folders, dates stretching forward in careful increments. Some were labeled by place. Others by season. One was marked for the off-season trip she’d never told him about, planned around access windows she’d assumed would hold. Another was marked family, unfinished, its subfolders still empty.

She didn’t open them.

She already knew what was inside. Lists. Sequences. Notes that depended on conditions remaining negotiable.

She hovered over the file longer than she expected to. Deleting it didn’t feel like giving up. It felt like clearing space–removing a structure that had begun to make promises she no longer trusted.

She told herself she could recreate it later, if circumstances changed. If access reopened. If temporary stopped meaning indefinite.

She closed the laptop without saving.

In the morning, she leaves something on the nightstand.

It’s different each day. A leaf from the path she walks to work. Something caught in the cuff of her coat. A small fragment she notices without looking for it. She places it where his hand will find it before his eyes do.

They never talked about it when it began. It wasn’t an agreement or a decision. Just a habit that formed early on, back when the future felt wide enough not to require explanation. A way of saying I’m here without asking what would come next.

Some mornings, he notices it right away. On other days, he finds it later, when he reaches for his glasses or his camera and pauses. He never asks where it came from. She never explains.

The future doesn’t widen.

But this still fits.

This still holds.