Empty Trails, Live Oaks

Winter in Houston is a rumor most years, but today it feels true. Sam Houston Park is all breath and oak and boards that remember other boots. The skyline hangs beyond the trees like a postcard someone forgot to send.

Leaves bruise under your steps—brown, soft, not quite surrendering. The cabins hold their own silence, shutters closed like careful mouths. A fountain ticks somewhere out of sight. You listen. It keeps its secrets.

No joggers. No wedding photos. No school buses disgorging field trips. Just wind moving through live oaks older than your worries, and a stripe of sun warming the wooden rails as if to say, here, for now, enough.

You take the longer path along the pond, and the city dims to a hum you could pocket. Your phone, patient and heavy, sleeps in your jacket. You let the trail be your only notification.

A heron stands where the water doesn’t freeze but pretends. You count to twelve before it blinks. You think, not for the first time, that being alone and being lonely aren’t twins—they’re cousins who sometimes borrow each other’s jackets.

At the far bench—the one that faces both the pond and a sliver of skyline—you sit and name what isn’t here: no sirens, no deadlines, no voice asking why you’re still not over it. The air has edges again. You let them hold you.

When you finally stand, the boards don’t complain. You leave as you arrived: a quiet guest, boots printing a story that will blow smooth by afternoon. On the way out, you tip your head to the oaks like elders. Winter answers by not arguing.

For once, there’s no one to witness you. It feels like a permission slip you wrote for yourself and signed with both hands.