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Hanzou Sep 1
There was once a soul who waited,
not for riches or for fame,
but for the warmth of simple words,
and the keeping of a name.

Each promise carried weight unspoken,
each “later” tied a fragile thread,
but silence came and filled the spaces,
where presence should have been instead.

The heart did not break in thunder,
no storm tore it apart,
it faded slowly, day by day,
from being half-forgotten in the dark.

This is how people drift away,
not in fire, not in fights,
but in the quiet moments missed,
in the absence of good nights.

And in the end, the hardest cost:
a promise delayed is a promise lost.
Hanzou Aug 31
Grief is not an accident, nor a flaw of the heart.
It is the shadow cast by love,
and no life that has known love can escape it.

To grieve deeply is not a mark of weakness,
but of fullness.
For the heart does not mourn emptiness,
it mourns only what was real,
what once gave weight to our existence.

Love and grief are twin truths,
bound together in the order of things.
To receive one is to inherit the other.
When love departs, grief remains,
not as an enemy, but as its last and faithful servant.

Thus, to grieve is to testify,
that there was something in this fleeting world
so worthy, so profound,
that its absence could unmake us.

Grief, then, is the final language of love.
Where lips fall silent,
where hands can no longer reach,
grief speaks, and in speaking,
keeps love alive.
Hanzou Aug 20
Once, his days were colored by her voice,
a sound so bright it painted the silence,
made even the smallest hours
feel like they carried meaning.

He remembers it still,
like a lantern's glow kept in a jar,
warm, flickering,
but dimmer each time he opens it.

There was a season
when her laughter was the wind in his sails,
when every "good morning"
felt like a promise the world was kinder
than he ever dared believe.

But seasons do not last.
Even spring, with all its blossoms,
must give way to the weight of time.

And so the days pass.
He still feels her,
like the ghost of perfume on an old scarf,
or the echo of footsteps in an empty hall.
It lingers, but softer now,
a whisper instead of a shout.

This is how love fades,
not with the cruelty of sudden silence,
but with the gentleness of distance,
a slow unraveling of threads
that once held his heart together.

He does not curse it,
nor cling to it as he once did.
For he knows now,
love does not vanish,
it transforms.

And one day,
when the ache is only a shadow,
he will look back at her smile in memory,
and instead of breaking,
he will simply whisper,

"thank you."
Hanzou Aug 18
He once thought the hardest part
was losing her,
but he was wrong.

The real wound came later,
when he saw her laugh with someone else,
that same laugh that had once
split his silence wide open.

It was not betrayal,
not even cruelty,
just the simple cruelty of life,
how quickly the sacred
becomes ordinary again.

Another would learn her pauses,
her little turns of phrase,
the way she tilted her head
before saying something soft.
Another would walk the paths
he thought were carved for him.

And he,
helpless,
watched the living memory unfold.
Not a ghost of her,
but a ghost of himself,
standing outside the firelight,
unwelcome, unnecessary,
a chapter left open
but never read again.

Some nights he would whisper,
not to her,
but to the empty air,
"I am still here,
bleeding quietly,
while you write your next beginning."

For ghosts do not come from the dead,
they come from the living,
and nothing is crueler
than seeing your forever
become someone else’s beginning.
Hanzou Aug 18
He gave her his dawns,
his nights, his trembling heart,
but when silence came,
her sorrow leaned heavier
for another name.

She wept for a ghost
that was never hers,
and he, the Fool,
learned the cruelest truth,
that love can be given,
yet grief belongs elsewhere.
Hanzou Aug 17
There were two travelers who once found each other at a crossroads.
Both carried broken maps, torn by storms and years of wandering,
and for a time, they walked together.

They promised, or so the man thought,
that if the roads grew too heavy,
they would pause, mend their maps,
and meet again when they were whole.
To him, it was not the end,
but a waiting place,
a promise left under the shade of a tree.

But to her, it was farewell.
Not cruel, not heartless,
simply the closing of a chapter she had already read through.
And so while he lingered beneath the tree,
believing she would return,
she had already turned toward another path,
her footsteps steady, her gaze fixed forward.

He did not hate her for this.
How could he?
They were both free to walk where they wished.
But as he watched her figure fade into the distance,
he could not help but wonder,
how could love that once felt like fire in the veins
be set down so quickly, as if it were nothing more than ash?

He searched his chest for answers.
Perhaps he had carried their love as a seed,
waiting for spring,
while she had carried it as a bloom,
beautiful, fleeting, and already finished.

And so the man stayed by the tree,
haunted by the weight of a promise
he now realized was only his.
Hanzou Aug 13
They say every fable ends with a lesson,
but not every lesson comes with closure.

The Fool did not return to the valley to seek the Fox again. He knew the forest kept what it wanted, and the Fox was now part of that hush.

For two moons, she had been his spring,
a season too brief to be called forever, yet deep enough to change the soil where he stood.

Her laughter had been the wind in his sails,
her presence a shelter against nights when the cold bit deeper than loneliness. And for that short, blazing time, he had believed in warmth again.

But stories are not meant to be cages.
They are meant to be carried, to be told and retold until the ache softens, and the lesson remains even when the faces fade.

So the Fool stepped away from the valley.
He did not rush, nor look back more than once. Because some love is not meant to be reclaimed, only remembered.

And in the quiet of his journey, he realized the truth:
He had loved the Fox as wholly as a heart could love, and though the story had ended, it had given him something precious, the proof that he could love again.

The valley remained behind him.
The road stretched before him.
And somewhere, far away,
the Fox’s laughter still lived in the wind.
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