Kindness Never Dies
I keep a garden of moments you no longer remember.
Unspoken apologies grow there,
like pale roots twisting through the soil.
The air hums with all the softness
that never made it past your teeth.
All the gentleness that turned back
at the threshold of your chest.
I walk this garden often.
And I will tell you something strange:
There is no grave here for kindness.
Not a single one.
Every act of mercy you offered…
no matter how small…
did not die.
It changed shape.
And became something that does not decay in the ways you understand.
Kindness does not rot… but absence…
Absence lingers.
There are corridors here,
lined with moments you refused to touch:
A hand that hovered,
then fell.
A word that almost softened,
then sharpened instead.
These things do not fade.
They echo.
Softly, and eternally.
You have been taught to fear giving too much.
To guard your light as if it were finite.
As if warmth were something that could run dry.
It is not the giving that hollows you.
It is the withholding.
Every time you turned away from tenderness,
something within you folded in on itself.
Like a star choosing to forget how to burn.
And still… you wonder why certain nights feel heavier than they should.
Why certain memories return without anger.
Listen to me, little spark.
You will never ache for the kindness you offered.
Never lie awake, wishing you had been smaller and less open.
But the moments you denied your own softness?
They will find you.
And oh… how gently that truth will undo you.
So when the world asks you to harden…
when it hands you every reason,
to become distant and unreachable…
Hesitate. Just once.
Long enough to remember that kindness is not a loss, but a doorway.
And every time you choose it…
something unseen steps through and continues,
where you could not.
Leave fewer locked doors behind you.
Leave fewer echoes.
Because when I walk your garden again…
When I trace the shape of everything you almost became…
I would like to find less silence.
And more things that dared to bloom.
