The storm arrived slowly on Saturday morning, its voice low and restless—rolling thunder that barely stirred the curtains in her apartment but echoed steadily through her bones. The healing woman had sensed it coming even before the sky turned. There was always a subtle pressure shift before a storm that her body seemed to feel first—something in her breath, something in her spine. She had known it would rain today, and she welcomed the excuse to stay inside.

She had no plans to cancel. She never did.

Her life had been pared down to its quiet essentials: the stillness of her apartment, the slow pace of her shifts at work, the few errands she ran when necessary, and the green solace of the preserves and trails. She no longer met friends for coffee or sat in noisy restaurants making small talk. There had been a time when she might have. But over the past few years—especially since her mother passed—her desire to be around people had waned in ways she didn’t always have the words to explain.

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The only friends she truly spoke to now were online—scattered across states and time zones, threaded into her life through messages, the occasional phone call, and long, meandering conversations typed out late at night. They knew parts of her story, but none of them knew her in the physical spaces she inhabited. They didn’t see the way she moved through her home or sat quietly with her tea, or how she carried herself like someone always preparing to disappear for a while. The people in her daily orbit—coworkers, store clerks, the customers she served—only knew the exterior she offered. Kind. Efficient. Reserved.

It had become easier this way.

That Saturday, her younger son had risen late and disappeared into his room not long after breakfast, armed with snacks and headphones. The low rumble of his video game and muffled commentary spilled occasionally from beneath his door. He was close, and yet wholly absorbed in his world. She didn't interrupt. She understood the need to retreat.

The rain began in earnest around midmorning, a steady rhythm against the window panes. It wasn’t a gentle spring shower but a full-bodied storm—thunder punctuating the air like slow drum beats, wind gusting through the trees outside, and rain hammering the sidewalks with a kind of relentless intention. The sky, cast in deep gray, made the apartment feel dim even with the lamps turned on.

Three of her cats had claimed their spots across the living room—one curled like a comma on the windowsill, another stretched across the armchair, and the third pressed against her leg on the couch. Their unspoken companionship brought a kind of quiet stability she needed on days like this. They required nothing but her presence, and they gave her the same in return.

She sat curled in her usual corner of the couch, wrapped in a blanket, a cup of chamomile cooling slowly in her hands. Outside, water gushed through the downspouts, pooling on the asphalt and forming rivers between the curbs. She watched it trail past the cars and bend around the corners of the sidewalk, endlessly pulled forward, pulled down.

The world outside seemed far away. Inside, the stillness was thick and complete. Her son’s door remained closed, and the only movement came from the flick of a cat’s tail or the occasional shift of her own legs beneath the blanket. This kind of quiet, so different from the natural silence she found in the woods, had a weight to it. It was the kind of silence that reminded her she was alone.

She didn’t mind the solitude—not in the traditional sense. She had long since made peace with being by herself. She didn’t miss crowded places or forced conversations. But the truth of her loneliness ran deeper than preference. It was shaped by something far more personal—by grief.

Her mother had been gone for several years, and still, there were days when the ache of it rose like a tide that caught her off guard. On quiet days. On stormy days. On days when the sky felt like a mirror for everything she couldn’t say out loud. Most people in her life had moved past it, if they’d acknowledged it at all. Online, her friends were kind, but distant. No one asked about her mother anymore. No one really understood that the ache didn’t disappear with time—it simply grew quieter, more intricate, more bound to the fabric of her daily life.

And when she did mention her mother—her voice carefully measured, her words chosen with care—there was often an awkward pause. A quick change in topic. A gentle suggestion that maybe she should let go. Some even dismissed her reflections altogether, as if her continued grief was indulgent or misplaced.

But she hadn’t moved on. Not really. And she didn’t feel ashamed of that.

She rose from the couch slowly, her knees stiff, and carried her empty mug to the kitchen. The storm raged harder now. Rain swept in sheets across the glass. Trees bent under the wind’s pull. She paused at the window, watching droplets stream down in dozens of parallel lines, each one tracing its own path before slipping away. She pressed her hand to the cool glass and closed her eyes.

Her mind, almost instinctively, reached for the preserve.

She imagined the trees lining the marsh, soaked and darkened by the storm, their bark slick, their leaves glistening with water. She pictured the winding trail through the woods—muddy, puddled, still beautiful. The lake would be nearly invisible beneath the fog, the surface rippling in rhythm with the rain. In her imagination, she sat at the lake’s edge, water lapping near her boots, the woods whispering behind her. The storm, in this space, was not a weight but a cleansing. Her grief, carried into the woods, no longer felt misunderstood. It belonged there. It could be spoken there without judgment.

The kettle whistled, and she opened her eyes. She poured a second cup of tea, stronger this time, and returned to the couch. One of the cats shifted to make room for her, curling around her hip as she settled in.

She opened her notebook—not to write at first, but simply to hold it open across her knees. She turned to a blank page, stared at the paper, and then slowly began to write—not in complete sentences, but in the shape of thoughts:

The storm outside matches the one I carry.

Grief doesn’t leave. It changes shape.

Sometimes I forget the sound of her voice and it breaks something small inside me.

The words flowed quietly, steadily. She didn’t pause to reread them. She wasn’t writing to explain. She was writing to make space for her feelings to exist somewhere other than inside her chest.

As the storm moved on—still heavy, but less chaotic—the apartment settled back into rhythm. Her son laughed at something through the wall. A cat stretched and blinked at her. The rain softened. The grief, while still present, felt a little less sharp.

She folded the page carefully and closed the notebook, setting it beside her on the couch. She wasn’t ready to return to the world, but she didn’t need to escape it either. The storm would pass. The woods would wait. The lake would welcome her back.

And so, for now, she let herself sit in the quiet, a little more whole than she had been an hour before.

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