Meet me beneath the Balete tree

They say the forest remembers.

Not just footsteps or names, but endings-the quiet ones, the unfinished ones, the kind that linger long after the world has already moved on.

She comes to it not out of curiosity, but because there is nowhere else left to go.

The air feels different when she steps inside, as if the world has softened its edges just for her. Time behaves strangely here-sometimes too slow, sometimes slipping ahead without warning. Even her breath feels borrowed, like something she is only allowed to keep for a little while longer.

Then there is him.

He does not appear all at once. He is there in fragments at first-a presence just beyond reach, a voice that seems to echo from nowhere and everywhere at once. The forest bends around him as if it knows his name, as if it has always known him.

When he finally becomes real enough to stand before her, there is no surprise in his eyes. Only recognition. Like she is not something new, but something he has already learned to carry in silence.

He does not ask why she came.

He does not ask her to leave.

Instead, he walks beside her, matching her slowing steps as though he has all the time in the world-or none at all. And in the strange quiet that follows them, she begins to notice something unbearable and gentle at the same time: she is not being chased away from the forest.

She is being kept.

As if he has been waiting.
Not for her arrival, but for her ending.

And somewhere between the shifting paths and the silence that follows them, she begins to wonder-

if she wandered into the forest by mistake...

or if she was always meant to find it before the world could finally let her go.