It wasn’t supposed to mean anything.
Just a step, one careless moment when the light broke through the clouds and I thought why not? The air smelled of wet grass and the kind of stillness that comes after something has wept all night. I wasn’t trying to find meaning in it. But sometimes, even in the smallest gestures, the heart betrays itself.
When my foot sank into the mud, it felt honest, the kind of honesty that doesn’t speak but simply exists. The cold bit my skin, and the earth pressed against me with the quiet insistence of something that has seen too much. It didn’t reject me; it welcomed me with that heavy tenderness the world offers when it knows you’ve run out of ways to pretend.
I looked down, later, at the mess I’d made, the stains climbing up my ankle, the dirt in the creases of my skin. There was a strange intimacy in it, this mark of having chosen wrong, of having wanted to feel even when it would cost me cleanliness.
We all do it, don’t we?
We play in the puddle.
We mistake the shimmer for safety.
We step in because we want to remember what it’s like to be unafraid, to feel without calculating the aftermath.
And when the mud dries, when it cracks against our skin, we call it regret. But perhaps it’s only proof that we were alive enough to forget ourselves for a moment.