Downhill
- Rylie Martin
- Jul 30
- 1 min read
I thought
veils
were lifted
to reveal
a future.
I was wrong.
Sometimes
they’re lifted
to reveal
the truth.
Devotion,
it seems,
doesn’t always receive
permission
to stop.
For a while,
I kept waiting
for the current
to change
its mind.
But you cannot reason
with a stream.
You can ask it to dry,
but it will always remember
downhill
without forgetting
where it came from.
You can ask
the beaver
to dam it all
for you,
but that won’t make
him start
building.
Maybe
that is healing:
accepting
that every trickle
leaving the foothills
eventually
finds a valley.
We were
a single raindrop
landing
on the Continental Divide.
You went east.
I went west.
Neither of us
knew
we were leaving.
At first,
the distance between us
was smaller
than a fingertip.
Then gravity
kept making decisions
for us.
By the time
we understood
what direction meant,
we were already
becoming
different rivers.
Somewhere,
we are still rain.
But here,
you are becoming
one ocean,
and I
another.
I used to think
love ended
when two people
began walking
toward different places.
Now I think
some people
remain
like heartwood—
hidden,
strengthening
everything
that grows
around them.
I don’t need
to carve you out.
Trees
don’t survive
by forgetting
their rings.
They survive
by growing
another.
So I’ll carry
what was true.
Leave behind
what was only
imagined.
And if one day
someone lifts
my veil again,
I hope
our road can bend
serpentine
without bending us
toward
a dead end.
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