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There was a time in her life when all she had was hope, and it was not the quiet kind that flickers, but the radiant kind that insists upon itself, like a summer sun, full-bodied and stubborn, like a pillar carved by angels who had never known defeat.
It was not a hope for happiness, nor even for love. She would have accepted a still corner of the world, a patch of shade no one else claimed, if only she might sit there in peace and call it hers.
It took years to find such a place. Not because it was far, but because no one had ever shown her how to enter it.
When beauty did appear, it arrived as something meant for others, the rooms too immaculate to touch, the light too tender to last. It always felt borrowed, like wearing a dress sewn for a life she had never lived, one that would never quite belong to her skin.
She had been bathed in basins meant for dishes, wrapped in towels that smelled faintly of someone else’s flowers. And once, the very basin that had cradled her skin was used to carry lamp oil, then lit with a match by a hand that had once fed her, a hand meant to protect. The flames rising from its rim looked, for a moment, as though they had always belonged there more than water ever had.
She spent years seeking for her own quiet, her own space, in water, and in fire. But what she found too often reflected only fragments of what she longed for, or nothing at all. Sometimes there was clarity in the places, or in the people. Sometimes only silence, so flat it felt like forgetting. Still, she searched, again and again, because trying was the only way to prove that hope had not drowned beneath all she had carried.
And one day, high on a hill, she came upon it, a place so quiet, it felt like a secret kept by the earth itself. She knew, just by looking, that the Bathing Pool did not heal, did not cleanse, did not promise anything. It accepted what entered it and asked nothing in return.
It was a stillness carved into the ground, as if the world had once made space for those who asked for nothing more than to simply be.
There were women there, five in total. They barely moved, and they did not seem to speak. They were not together, nor truly apart. And yet something in the gentle folding of their bodies, in the slowness of their breath, made her understand that each had once come here aching, and had remained only because they no longer were.
She stood at the edge and knew the women had seen her, not because they turned, but because they didn’t. They had found where they belonged, and it no longer mattered that they were nude, or vulnerable. This was their place.
She did not join them.
She only placed her hand against the bark of a nearby tree, not for balance, but to quiet the trembling that rose up, sudden and sharp. The pool was everything she had searched for. And heartbreakingly, she did not believe she was ready to enter it. To embrace it as the other women had.
The Bathing Pool was peaceful. It was sacred. But she was not ready. And that, more than anything, was what made it unbearable.
And in that moment, she understood:
That nothing here demanded she remain outside.
But some part of her still believed that love, and above all, belonging, were things she was meant to admire without ever claiming.
She stood just beyond the edge of beauty, and thanked it for not turning her away.
