…..
There are memories that do not risk being forgotten, for forgetting was never what threatened them.
What she feared was change and alteration, that time might wear them thin, softening their edges until what she remembered was no longer the truth.
She pursued certain moments often and not to relive them, but to reclaim them, to feel again, with aching precision, the meaning of her own becoming. To remember not merely who she had been, but what she had borne.
Not for sorrow, and not even for solace, but for proof: that she had endured, that she had passed through, and that no one, not even time, could take it from her.
And now, as she stepped onto the overgrown lawn, she saw them.
Not the past, but its shapes.
Three deer stood beyond the archway, framed in ivy and ruin, their slender forms burnished by the last, failing light of day. They did not startle, nor did they flee.
They watched her without accusation, as memories do, silent, unchanging, and entirely her own. She knew the deer were not real, at least, not in the way the world defines it.
And yet, they carried something she had not encountered in years: the unmistakable clarity of a memory seen without distortion. They were not illusions, but revelations, small fragments of the past, shown plainly, without disguise.
She did not step closer. Even had she wished to, she could not. For to move might scatter them, and more than loss itself, she feared the grief of watching them vanish.
She was reminded once more why recollection mattered above all else: it returned her to the places that had shaped her, not as an escape, but as a search, a reaching back for the fire that had once flared beneath her ribs, wild and unyielding.
But this time, something within her had shifted.
She no longer chased the flicker of feeling that rose when she brushed against the past. This time, she had come to catch the memories, and hold them.
To catalogue them, to give them names.
To gather the scattered pieces and press them into the soil of her being, not as wounds to be mourned, but as roots from which a truer self might yet grow.
When it came to the memories shaped like deer, she had not come to understand them.
Nor had she come to forgive them.
Only to catch them and to live beside them, as one lives in a forest grown wild: not tended, nor tamed, only fully embraced.
