Thank you for sharing that, Bryce. I really honor what you’re navigating—it takes clarity and courage to name those patterns, especially with someone close. The way you’re finding grounding in place, in practice, and in your own presence is powerful. I’ve written a short story inspired by your meditation, interweaving themes of transformation, emotional clarity, the ecology of space, and symbolic renewal. I hope it resonates:
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Title: Seeds of the Unseen
Beneath the soft arc of the Butterfly Bridge, where the concrete met the water in weary angles, a quiet threshold pulsed between worlds. Shoal Creek flowed lazily below, its surface reflecting the underside of the city like a broken promise. On one side of the bridge was the Library, rising like a fortress of ideas. On the other side, tents nestled in the brush, hunched against wind and indifference.
Marin stood at the railing, fingers wrapped around the warm steel, feeling the way the bridge hummed beneath passing footsteps. It had become a ritual, this vantage point—halfway between containment and release. The Library, once a place of obligation, now opened to her like a sanctuary. She had begun arriving early, even on weekends, grateful for the quiet rooms, the click of the HVAC, the light through upper windows. No one asked her to come. She just… did.
Her desk, once a tether, had become a perch. The act of working—editing systems, refining interfaces, making information just a little more generous—gave her a steady rhythm. A counterpoint to the dissonance of her unraveling relationship.
She hadn’t told anyone yet about the separation. Not really. What could she say? That he had seemed so small and sweet at first, full of quiet dreams and shared playlists, only to twist over time into a tangle of need, charm, and cold withdrawal? That he only seemed truly alive when she was uncertain of herself? That when she finally named his behavior, vulnerable narcissist fell like a key into a lock?
Instead, Marin walked.
She left the building after dusk, cut down toward the lake where the trail turned to water. Sometimes she sat. Sometimes she yielded—moved if someone was already there, curled under blankets or muttering into dreams. The birds were less demanding. They watched her with still eyes, accepting her presence as long as she moved like someone who belonged to the land.
She’d found a tree—a great, ragged live oak whose limbs arched in quiet exclamation—near the old Seaholm Intake. The structure, once a mouth drinking deeply from the lake, now stilled and hollowed, waited to become an art gallery. A conversion of purpose. A ruin becoming a reliquary.
Here she practiced Qigong, each motion a whisper to the soil, each breath an undoing of something heavy. She thought of the seeds she imagined planting—not in the literal dirt, but in the air between gestures. Ideas, hopes, the quiet defiance of healing. She saw herself years from now, visiting this tree, watching its shape unchanged even as hers evolved.
The city was changing too, in ways few people noticed. A new initiative had begun to seed “organic media” installations—living artforms blending augmented reality and ecology. You could walk past the Seaholm structure and, with the right lens, see poems floating in the canopy or ghost-trails of dancers who had once moved through the space. Marin had seen one recently: a woman in red, overlaid in real time, standing exactly where Marin stood beneath the oak, reaching her arms to the sky like she was remembering something she’d never actually known.
The piece was titled W.A.S.T.E.: Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology. She’d laughed quietly at the acronym, a knowing sort of chuckle. There was something soothing in the honesty of it. Waste as a beginning. Waste as nutrient. She liked that it acknowledged the mess.
Beneath the bridge, a man washed his hands in the creek. Across the way, someone tucked a solar panel into a fold of tent canvas. The city shimmered, broken and becoming.
Marin let her breath out slowly. She was no longer in hiding, just not yet in bloom. And maybe that was enough.
The oak stood above her, steady and strange, a reminder that roots could hold even when everything else was uncertain. She touched its bark. Closed her eyes.
She was home.
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