In life, you have two choices: you get softer, or harder. Softness is a cat lying on its back, the belly exposed. An animal who used to be wild forgets they can be a predator, or prey, forgets they can wound, or be wounded, and displays an unmitigated trust.

My dad, for example, has softened up with age. I think he always wanted a clean independence, and once he had it, once his life was entirely his and he could spend his days reading and walking in the woods, he relaxed, and all the softness that was inside of him came into the surface and became a gift for my sister and I, his two daughters. It wasn’t a dramatic change, because the softness was always there; it was only a small deepening, but noticeable.

The biggest test for softness is love. You can’t be like a cat exposing their belly until you let your heart be held inside someone else’s fist. I talk and move softly, but maybe haven’t been truly soft like that. I always kept a small distance, even as I got close to another human being, even as I married him and loved him for over a decade. I chose him, maybe, because he already had a distance in him, and it protected us both against being truly soft. We were soft but just to a certain degree, a part of us still vigilant, holding on to bits of our heart without giving them away completely. We gave each other our hearts, without abandonment. And yet, the part of my heart that was given away will always be his, which is to say more accurately a part of my stomach will always be his: the part that aches and worries and fills with acid and anxiety and fills with butterflies and warms with tenderness, a part of the softest part, will always belong to him.

Now, as my heart and my life open again into a wide, unknown space, I just want to be soft, truly brave, at least once. I want to fall into the abyss of a love that can nearly kill me. Because what is the point of living and what is the point of loving if you don’t ever get to tremble in front of a magnificent, bone-breaking storm, and let yourself be drenched, and forget, for a while, that you can wound, or be wounded.

I’ve said this before, to myself, many times. I’ve made speeches and silent proclamations resolving to be brave. Then I went into my life and held a distance or chose a man who held a distance so we could both be together, but on guard. So we’ll see.

Here’s the illustration of a small, wild, soft creature. A marten.

The text below is a translation into English of something I wrote in Spanish last fall.

A single tree is never just one tree but a multitude of trees. Specially in the north, where seasons bring multiple violent changes. During the fall, a tree is a different tree from one week to the next, from one day to the next depending on the light and the colours of the sky, from one minute to the next depending of the wind. I come as often as I can to this park, and I see the trees change ceaselessly. A week ago, a group of almost naked and very tall trees, with just some yellow delicate leaves at the top, started moving back and forward pushed by a single wave of wind. There was enough silence to hear the air passing through the leaves, looking at the leaves moving softly against the sky. I wanted to take a video, but a loud group of young people passed near me and then the wind stopped. The leaves were still, and those were now different trees. Trees are a multitude of moments that end, start, and end again. My dad goes out for a walk on the same mountain every morning. He knows too that the mountain is a multitude of mountains, during the rainy season, or the dry season, under the January skies, or among October’s flowers, before sunrise under the light of the moon, or under the stars. If you can go back often to the same piece of the world, you learn that you can travel on the same spot, through time, and that a forest is a multitude of forests, just as the sky is a multitude of skies.

I write this on a bench, in a grey afternoon. It’s the end of the fall (the fall is also a multitude of falls). This one now, near the end of October, is a lot more monochromatic and the trees show their bones and the leaves still standing are almost all variations of copper. It’s cold and I write in a hurry because after a while my fingers start to hurt out of the pockets in my jacket. Its 5:30 and the sun will be gone in 40 minutes, but the sky is so full of clouds that all seems right now to be sinking in a sort of twilight. And against this twilight shine bright, almost fluorescent, the yellow patches of trees that tremble, irreplaceable, just for today, and just for me, in this moment.