What We Never Buried

Whilst walking St Edmund Way,

the question rose in me

as quietly as breath between steps:

How much of what holds us up

is made from what we never managed to bury?

I stopped in front of a tree

that refused to hide.

Its roots were out, exposed,

thick as old thoughts,

folding over themselves,

holding the ground

as if the earth had once said no.

There were hollows in them,

small chambers of undoing

where leaves had gathered,

soft, brown, returning.

Nothing hidden.

Nothing cleared away.

And something in me recognised it.

We are taught to believe strength grows clean,

straight, upward.

Disciplined. Explained. Resolved.

But standing there,

on that path,

I felt another

pressing up through the soles of my feet.

There are places in me

where things were never laid to rest.

Not properly.

Not with words.

Not with witnesses.

They stayed.

Not as ghosts.

As tears.

A grief that never found a ritual

became endurance.

A word spoken too often

grew into a spine.

A love that ends without a goodbye

learns how to remain.

We call it resilience

because “unburied” sounds untidy.

But my body knows.

It builds around what it cannot release.

Layer by layer,

like roots gripping the surface

when the soil will not open.

That tree did not seem to hide

what had fallen into it.

It may have been using it.

The dead leaves in its hollows

were not failure.

They are food.

And I wondered—

not gently—

how much of me

is standing

because something unfinished refuses to leave,

and in refusing,

holds.

Nowton Park