I wrote this one in the middle of a rough patch. Not the dramatic kind. The kind where you are still in it, still together, but you have lost the thread and neither of you can work out where it went.
I kept going back over old ground. Trying to repair something that had already happened. You cannot fix the past, but that does not stop you standing in it, turning it over, looking for the piece you got wrong.
The willow came out of that. A tree that stood tall for years and then split. It is still a willow. It is still standing. It is just broken in a way everybody can see.
What I landed on by the end of writing it was that the repair is not the point. Forgiveness is. Not forgetting, and not pretending it did not happen, just deciding to stop pulling at it. Love does the rest, if you let it.
The tree does not go back to how it was. It just keeps growing.