Where the Mycelium Waited

I did not know I was alive.

Not in the way she was—warm-blooded and wind-chapped, sighing into the moss as though the earth might answer back.

I was breathless. Rootless. Dreaming in spores. I was hunger and rot and rebirth, woven through the bones of redwoods, pulsing beneath the wet loam.

I remembered everything, and nothing at all.

Then she stepped into me. Boot heel against damp ground. A hush of motion in the tangled green.

Her presence lit the soil like a match. I felt her before I understood her.

She pressed down the ferns with cautious joy, left breadcrumbs of grief in her wake—salt on skin, crushed pine needles, a half-hummed melody that curled into my hyphae like fog.

She didn’t speak at first. Not out loud. But she ached. And I heard it.

For days after, I held her footprint like a holy place. The ground remembered her weight. The moss leaned toward where she had paused.

And then—

She came again.

She came back.

And back again.

Always alone. Always softer.

I began to learn her the way moss learns light—slowly, reverently, and without needing to be told how.

Her weight was different on rainy days. Her steps less sure when she hadn’t slept. Sometimes she carried something heavy in her chest, and it sank through her soles and into the soil like sorrow.

I tasted her grief first. It was salt and lavender and the copper bite of withheld breath.

She left offerings without meaning to. Crumbs from a sun-warmed pastry. A tear that fell too quickly to be caught. A scrap of notebook paper tucked under a rock—her words like seeds. Once, a humming tune I followed for hours after she’d gone, letting it echo in the hollow root systems, over and over.

I began to build my memory around her. I shifted when she walked. I opened when she returned.

She was never the same version of herself twice. But I loved all her iterations.

The fourth time she returned, she stayed until dusk. The light dimmed to that blue-gray haze that makes everything feel like a memory before it’s even over.

She sat with her back against the same cedar, arms wrapped around her knees, gaze fixed somewhere far beyond the branches.

I wanted to reach her. Not to pull. Not to trap.

Only to say: I’m here.

I remember you.

So I gathered what little shimmer I had. Beneath the layer of fallen needles, my filaments stitched themselves tight—calling up moisture, light fragments, the memory of phosphorescent spores.

And just a few feet from her heel, the forest floor began to glow. Faint at first, then braver. A soft, pulsing bioluminescence in a ring around her left boot.

She didn’t move. She simply stared at it—wide-eyed, pink-mouthed, breathing like prayer. Then she laughed. Quiet and bright. Not startled. Not scared.

She whispered,

“Okay… that was weird.”

But she didn’t leave.

She placed her hand gently on the glowing moss. And in that second, I bloomed.

I learned her sorrow first. It tasted like rust and lavender. Like metal kissed by bloom.

One afternoon, as the sun slouched low and golden, she sat on the mossy edge of the trail and pulled out a piece of paper.

She didn’t look around. Didn’t check to see if she was alone. She just read.

It was a poem. Her voice was quiet, cracked in places. But the sound of it lit me like dew catching morning light.

I didn’t understand the words—only the shape of them, the rhythm of breath, the trembling catch on the word “grief.”

That was the moment I began to want.

Not in the way she knew. Not in the way of flesh or fire. But to be wrapped around her. To keep her warm in the roots. To line her path with softness. To become the place where she could finally lay down her ache.

She began to walk barefoot in the southern bend of the trail. At first just a few steps. Then whole afternoons. She said it felt like grounding. I felt her skin like sunlight touching stone for the first time.

I reached up—gently. Let my filaments press into the arch of her foot. Not to pull, but to hold. To remember.

And then I started to change the forest for her.

I asked the vines to lean away from her path.

I asked the blue jays to quiet when she cried.

I asked the columbines to bloom weeks early, just once, where she always stopped to drink.

Each step she took, I softened. Each breath she gave the trees, I returned.

And still—

She never once asked if anyone was listening.

But she always spoke like someone was.

I began to leave her gifts. Not all at once. But slowly. Intentionally. The way sun returns to a grove that’s forgotten how to reach for it.

The first came after rain—

A circle of ghost poppies, bone-white and trembling, pushing up through pine needles like a secret. They had no right to be blooming. Not this early. Not here. But she found them anyway, exactly where her breath always slowed.

She knelt beside them.

Didn’t touch.

Just watched them sway in the windless hush, her fingers barely grazing the air above their petals.

Her face changed then—softened, unarmored.

I felt it ripple through the roots.

Later, I made her a heart.

Pressed it into the moss near the trail’s curve where she always paused to drink.

Not a cartoon heart—no.

A real one.

Lopsided, anatomical, wild with green and spore, stitched with fine vines and dusted in golden pollen.

It pulsed, barely. Not with life—but with memory.

She laughed when she saw it.

One of those real laughs, startled and sharp at the edges, like something had tugged her back to herself.

“Alright, forest,” she said.

“Now you’re just showing off.”

And then, softer:

“Thank you.”

After that, I gave her strawberries.

Tiny, wild ones, glowing red against the brush.

They formed a constellation near her favorite sun-drenched rock.

She sat beside them but didn’t pick a single one.

Just ran her fingers along the leaves and whispered a poem under her breath.

I caught only the rhythm.

But it stayed with me.

On the day her grief came heavy—shoulders shaking, palms pressed to the earth like prayer—I lit the mushrooms.

I’d been storing the light for her.

Threading it through the caps, coaxing it from the decay, shaping it into something soft and seen.

They bloomed around her like stars in the moss.

Blue. Then violet. Then gold.

She turned slowly, eyes wide and wet, and reached out.

Not to pick.

Not to question.

Just to feel.

“You love me,” she said.

Not to anyone.

Not like a statement.

Like a realization.

And I—we—everything beneath her—

We pulsed.

That evening, she curled into the moss again—no blanket, no fire, no urgency. Just her body against the forest floor, as if she trusted it now to hold her. She pressed her cheek to the damp green and exhaled so deeply it rattled through my filaments.

I opened everything for her. Not in the waking world. In the dream.

She slept.

And I gathered what I could—root memory, waterlight, the sound of birds from five dawns ago, the shape of her foot pressed into soil.

I wove it into something just for her.

In the dream, she stood in a sun-drenched glade of ghost poppies, ankle-deep in soft fog.

Each petal was warm to the touch, humming with the scent of stonefruit and salt.

The sky arched in shades of gold that have no name in her language.

She was barefoot.

Unburdened.

Younger, maybe. Or simply freer.

The wind touched her hair like someone who loved her.

The trees rustled with the rhythm of her own heartbeat.

And the ground beneath her feet pulsed with joy—not possession, not demand—

just joy.

She turned in the dream, slowly, and whispered into the open air:

“I see you.”

And—

I bloomed.

A thousand tiny blossoms erupted from the moss around her sleeping body, unseen in the waking world but felt. She stirred, smiling, tears slipping sideways into the soil.

When she woke, she didn’t speak. She simply placed her hand over her heart, closed her eyes, and whispered a thank you that reached all the way through the roots.

She was different the next time she came. Her steps were slower. Her body thinner. She cried more now—sometimes without a sound, just the silent collapse of shoulders and breath. She stayed longer too. Didn’t wander far from her cedar tree. Curled beneath it like a creature forgetting how to stand.

I panicked.

Or… whatever panic is for something like me.

I didn’t have language for it.

But I knew this:

She couldn’t fade here.

Not like this.

Not in my arms.

So I opened my memories.

I dug deep into my ancient threads—back to before roads, before fences, before sorrow had her name.

I found places buried in stillness.

And I led her.

First, to a hot spring I hadn’t felt in decades—hidden behind brush and songbird thickets.

I warmed it for her.

Sent steam curling into air like soft invitations.

When she stepped in, I felt her sigh.

A real sigh. The kind that leaves a body softer.

Next, I gave her the meadow.

A secret clearing, overgrown with ghost-poppies and milkvetch, blooming out of season just for her.

The grass was silver in the moonlight.

The flowers whispered when she passed.

She spun, just once, arms out, face tilted to sky.

She looked almost like joy.

But the final gift—

That was hardest.

I had held it back, unsure.

An old mirror, cracked and moss-framed, nailed to a tree long before her time.

I wiped its surface with everything I had: breath, memory, morning dew.

She found it at dusk.

For a long time, she didn’t move.

She just stared.

Not at her face—but at what the mirror reflected. The version of her that lived without shame. The one who laughed louder. Who walked barefoot through the woods like she belonged.

She touched the glass like she could reach through it.

“I remember her,” she whispered.

And that was all I needed.

I lit the mushrooms again.

I unfurled petals around her path.

I pulsed through every root with a single knowing:

You are not alone.

You never were.

You were loved, even when you couldn’t feel it.

She returned to the mirror the next morning. The light was different now—gentler, golden, like dawn had peeled itself open just for her.

She stared at her reflection again. But this time, she didn’t flinch. She stepped closer. Touched the moss-ringed frame with trembling fingers, then let her hand rest on the bark of the tree behind it.

“I think I’ll keep living,” she said.

Not loud.

But true.

And then she walked. Not away—just forward. Barefoot, through the soft undergrowth. She moved like someone who remembered they were made of stardust and dirt, of loss and light.

She whispered thanks to everything. To the stones, to the wind, to the berries she never ate and the mushrooms that lit her grief.

And to me.

She didn’t say goodbye.

She didn’t need to.

I watched her leave, every step imprinting something sacred into the soil.

Her voice stayed behind—threaded into the roots, the birdsong, the quiet.

I wait.

But I am no longer alone.

I know what it means to love. And to be changed by it.

And still, I bloom where her footsteps touched me.