There was a young man who lived in a cabin in a small forest on the outskirts of a town. In his youth, he’d built the cabin, but he’d done a fairly poor job of it. As he got older, he began to learn how to fix the cabin into a nicer place to live, and when that was done, he began to venture further into the forest. It was quite overgrown and there was much deadwood that needed to be burned away. For the first decade of his adult life, he ignored tending to the forest, and instead paid attention to paths through the forest. He would build benches and lamp posts, plant flowers, lure animals to the paths, to make them more enticing, and over the years he’d been visited by a number of women. They’d come to visit him and gotten to know him, but alas they’d all stayed a short time and all eventually left the wood the ways they’d come.

When the man got a bit older, he turned his attention toward the overgrowth in the forest, and began to trim and burn away a lot of unnecessary things. He tried to maintain many of the paths through the forest that he thought another woman may use to visit him in the future, but it quickly became overwhelming. He focused too much time on maintaining these paths, and he didn’t make much progress at all on maintaining the wood as a whole. One day, while he was on the outskirts of the wood, he noticed a young woman from a nearby town. He sat and watched her for a while, and he marveled at her charm and her elegance. As dusk drew nearer, he knew he had to head back to his cabin. He made every attempt to revisit this spot on occasion in hopes that he might catch another glimpse of the mystery woman. From time to time he would see her again, but he never had the courage to approach her. He continued to maintain the wood, and with the distraction of the young woman, he devoted less time to maintaining the paths. All but one of the paths became quickly overgrown, though he never maintained any of them, this one path seemed to blossom entirely on its own in all the right ways. One day while on this path, he noticed the young woman standing at the head of it by the edge of the wood looking in. Dark as it was in the wood, she couldn’t see him, and never having been into the wood before, she simply watched and then returned to the village. He never saw her there again, but he came to realize that the path was meant for her.

He decided that he would continue to maintain the forest and the one path should it need it, but all the others paths he would abandon entirely. Then one day while he was in his spot, hoping to see the young woman again, he noticed she was leaving her village behind. He skirted around the edge of the wood, never getting too far away, just to see where she was headed. Just as he lost sight of her village, he saw a large city in the distance and concluded that that must be where she was headed. He became distraught and worried that he may never see her again. He decided to abandon her path and try to clear some of the others paths that had become so overgrown. He couldn’t explain why, but this felt wrong to him, and he noticed that her path never did quite become overgrown, still as beautiful as it ever had been, without him lifting a finger. The wood also became overgrown with his attention divided to clearing the other paths again. He dreamed about the young woman almost every night, and she occupied his waking thoughts. He couldn’t get her out of his head no matter what he did. He decided that this was how he would live. He would tend to his wood, taking care to maintain it as best he could. He would visit her path once in a while, but the most it ever needed was a little water, or a weed or two plucked from the earth. He never built any benches or planted any flowers as he had in the past. He simply let it grow as it would, waiting for the young woman that would likely never see it. He became more free in his thoughts and more disciplined in his actions. He became better at maintaining the wood, so much so that he often had time to venture outside of the wood, to the girls village. He made friends with people who knew her, but he never told of his feelings for her, or the path that existed for her and her alone. As he became closer with the villagers, they became like family to him. He would serve them in any capacity he needed to, and it brought his life meaning. He realized that without ever even knowing him, she had made him the man he was meant to be; even if she never knew him, that would be enough.

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