They say the Fool was not always alone.

I know this because, years ago, on nights when the fire burned low and the wind howled against the shutters, he told me his story.
He didn’t tell it like a tale meant to entertain.
He told it like a man laying out pieces of himself, as if speaking the memories aloud might keep them from fading, or maybe, as if saying them aloud was the only way to bear their weight.

It always began the same way.

"The first time I saw the Fox," he would say, "it was standing in the light just before dusk, that strange, golden hour where the world looks softer than it really is."

He told me how the Fox’s fur caught that dying sunlight like embers holding their last heat, and how its laugh, gods, the laugh, bent the air around it. Not a common laugh, but one that could slice through the stillness and make even the trees pause, as though they feared missing it.

The Fox did not give that laugh freely.
To strangers, it was quiet, even withdrawn. But to those it trusted… it came alive. Wild. Untamed. Pure.
The Fool had been one of the chosen few.

He said they were an unlikely pair, the Fox, with eyes like sharpened amber, and himself, a man weighed down with shadows he’d never shaken. The Fool had lived with silence for so long that he’d begun to believe it was safer that way. Yet the Fox slipped past his guard with the ease of sunlight through cracks in old stone.

"It never tried to fix me," he told me once, voice low. "It just… stayed. And that was enough."

The valley became theirs. They walked the narrow paths beside the river, where the Fox would tell stories so absurd that the Fool would laugh until his ribs ached. They would linger beneath the great oak, where the Fox would hum tunelessly, and somehow the Fool would feel lighter just hearing it.

The Fool learned the cadence of the Fox’s steps, the tilt of its head when it was amused, the slight pause in its breathing when it was about to say something it thought might be too much. The Fox, in turn, learned the way the Fool’s shoulders eased when rain was coming, how he would bite the inside of his cheek when swallowing hard truths, and how his eyes softened when looking at things he feared to lose.

They were different in every way, yet they fit.

The Fool told me once, with a distant smile, "It felt like finding a missing part of myself I didn’t know I’d lost."

And yet, even as he spoke of it, there was always something in his voice, a tremor, almost too faint to notice, that told me he had known, even then, that it could not last.

Because every perfect day in the valley carried the whisper of an ending.
The laugh that filled the air could be stolen by silence.
The warmth of a shoulder against his could turn cold in an instant.
The paths they walked together could one day be walked alone.

The Fool said he pushed those thoughts away at the time, telling himself not to ruin what was still his to hold. But memory is cruel, it does not only remember the joy, it remembers the shape of the loss before it comes.

And then, one day, the Fox was simply gone.

No storm. No quarrel. No final words.
Only absence, sharp and sudden, as if the forest itself had reclaimed what it had lent him.

He searched, not wildly, but with the quiet desperation of a man trying to prove the past was real. The valley, once filled with the Fox’s voice, seemed larger now, its silence heavier. Every place they had been together was still there, but smaller, emptier, like an echo stripped of its sound.

He told me that the weeks with the Fox had been the shortest and most important in his life. That for the first time in years, he had believed his heart could open again. That love could live even in a man who had learned to bury it.

And then, as the firelight flickered across his face, he said the words I will never forget:

"This," he murmured, his gaze fixed on nothing, "is the most beautiful thing I have ever ruined."

After that, he didn’t speak for a long time. But I understood something then, the story was not for me, not really. It was for the Fox, wherever it had gone.
A story meant to keep it alive, even if only in the telling.

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.

Years have passed since I last heard the Fool speak of the Fox.

Time, as it does, has softened the lines of his face and bent his shoulders forward, but it has not dulled the weight in his voice when her name, though he never spoke it, lingers in the air between sentences. Even silence has a way of carrying her.

I have walked the valley as he once did, retracing the paths he described. I have stood beneath the great oak where the Fox would hum, leaned over the river’s edge where laughter once spilled like water, and felt the stillness that remains. It is not an empty stillness, no, it is a stillness that remembers.

People here speak of the Fox and the Fool in hushed tones, not as a love story, but as a warning. They say it is easy to lose what is rare, and even easier to convince yourself it will wait for you. They say trust is not something you hold in your hand, but something you breathe, and once you choke on it, the air is never the same.

The Fool no longer searches. That part of him has gone quiet.

But when the wind moves through the valley just right, I have seen him pause, head tilted, eyes narrowing, as if some faint thread of that strange, foxlike laugh has drifted back to him. And every time, his face tightens with that same expression I saw by the fire years ago: the silent confession that the most precious thing he’d ever been given was also the one he shattered with his own hands.

He told me once, when I was younger and thought I understood the world, "If you ever find a fox, hold it gently. Never grip too hard, never doubt without cause. Foxes don’t return once frightened, and there are some silences you cannot call back."

I did not understand then.
I do now.

The valley has many stories, of storms, of seasons, of strangers who came and went, but none linger like theirs.

Because the Fool’s tale is not about the Fox’s leaving, not really.

It is about how a man can ruin his own salvation without meaning to, how he can mistake the echo of old wounds for truth, and how he can spend the rest of his days breathing in the absence of something that once made him whole.

And sometimes, when the nights are long and the moonlight cuts through the trees, I wonder if the Fox remembers him, too. I wonder if, somewhere beyond the valley, there is another fire, another listener, hearing the story from the other side.

Crystal gusts whistle—
fox paws print icy gravel
by evergreen pines

the fox spotted me;
as i rounded the corner
bags of groceries
jostling awkwardly
clutched in one fist
oblivious as i rummaged
the depths of my pocket
for the front door key
with the other

long before i spotted it;
that vulpine form
sleek and crafty
elusive yet stark
amongst these surroundings
more often heard
seldom seen
fleetingly at that

in the time that
it took me to recognise
this incursion
of the majesty of animal
upon the mundane of man
to stop and take notice
and give the underapreciated
the moment it deserved
to marvel as a child might
that cunning visitor had
already turned tail
determined and decided
it took its chosen course
without pause

I saw a fox just past the gate,
her eyes like dust, her breath like steam.
She didn't run, just watched me there,
half in the world, half in a dream.

Her coat was stitched with falling leaves,
the kind that never touch the ground.
I took a step, she took a breath,
then vanished without making a sound.

They say the wild won't wait for you,
it teaches fast, and leaves you slow.
But still I stand where foxes go-
too scared to chase,
too old not to.