Metaphorical Journeys Through Natural Realms

There was a forest that no map dared name, though it whispered across the tongues of dreamers and the sleepless alike.

They called it many things — The Hollow Green, The Rootway, The Place You Don’t Return From Whole — but its real name was simpler.

It was Grief.

And one morning, after the last chair had been pushed in at a long-empty dinner table, after her father’s old shirt no longer carried his scent, after the voicemail still blinked unheard, Mara stepped into it.

No suitcase. No plan. Only the shoes she removed at the edge of the trees, laying them beside a small, moss-covered stone that looked suspiciously like a heart.

The path was soft, the kind of soft that comes only after thousands have walked before you and never spoken of it. Pine needles, ash, crumbling leaves that once held sunlight in their veins. She walked on, each step pulling something old and heavy from the base of her spine, as though the earth were draining the sorrow from her bones.

She didn’t cry. The forest had no need for more salt.

At first, it was quiet.

Then came the birds — or what sounded like birds. Their calls were low and almost kind, the way someone might whisper “I know” without needing to explain what. Shadows moved like memories do: sudden, soft-edged, half-seen.

Mara passed a stream. It ran in reverse.

She watched, transfixed, as water defied gravity, tumbling upward over stones slick with time. And floating within it were pages. Letters, notes, torn scraps of journal entries.

She knelt, reaching for one. It read:

“I should’ve called her that night. But pride is a sharp thing. I bled, but wouldn’t say so.”

It dissolved in her fingers.

She rose.

Further on, she found a clearing where old regrets hung from trees like wind chimes. Each one was etched in glass — moments people wished undone, or unsaid.

She dared read a few:

“I married comfort instead of love.”

“I taught my child to be afraid of their own heart.”

“I stopped singing when they laughed.”

Each chime sang differently in the wind. Some bitter. Some beautiful.

One chime bore no words, only the shape of her mother’s smile — the one that faded during her third round of chemo, when the pain outpaced the laughter.

Mara touched it and the tree exhaled.

In its breath, she remembered how her mother smelled of lavender and old books. How she once told Mara, “You don’t have to carry every version of me.”

She walked again, barefoot and raw, the ground humming with memories not hers but deeply familiar. The forest, she realized, did not belong to her. She belonged to it.

It was a realm stitched from the unfinished poems of people who left too early. From the lullabies never sung. From hands that reached out too late.

She found a lake with no surface — only sky.

When she knelt at its edge, her reflection showed not her face, but the girl she once was at eight, chasing fireflies with her brother who now lived across the world and sent birthday messages too late.

The girl smiled up at her.

Mara turned away.

Somewhere deeper in, the path turned sharp. Roots reached like hands, not to harm but to remind her: Everything here is alive, even the ache.

There was a field next — golden, vast, and filled with voices buried in the grass.

She lay down.

And the voices rose.

“You did the best you could.”

“You were not too much.”

“They left because they were drowning, not because you failed to save them.”

“You’re still here.”

She wept, then. Quietly. Not because it hurt — but because the forest finally let her feel.

By nightfall, she came to the heart of the wood. A tree towered there, ancient and scarred, its bark carved with stories. One told of a boy who carried guilt like armor. Another of a woman who lost herself in loving others. And one — fresh, still soft to the touch — read:

“Mara walked the forest and gave her pain back to the soil. She learned to miss without drowning. To remember without crumbling. To love again without needing a wound to justify it.”

She placed her hand upon the carving.

And the tree glowed faintly beneath her palm — not with light, but with something older: acceptance.

Then, she sat. The forest sat with her.

Time passed the way it only does in grief — slowly, until it didn’t.

And when she rose, barefoot and a little lighter, the trees whispered not her name, but her promise:

“I will live.”

At the edge of the forest, her shoes were still there. Waiting. But she didn’t put them on.

She walked back into the world with dirt on her soles and clarity in her chest. The kind that doesn’t erase pain — only re-shapes it into something you can cradle.