# Footprints I walk a path worn smooth by many feet, each step an echo of the ones before— a thousand journeys compressed into the ground, pressed down like breath into the earth. The path knows something I don't, holds secrets in its dust and stone, remembers the urgency of hurried steps, the slow meditation of the bereaved, the careless wandering of children who hadn't yet learned the weight of destination. Sometimes I stop and look behind me. My own prints are already fading, swallowed back into the dust as if I'd never passed this way at all. The path is indifferent to my presence— it will forget me before the day is done. Yet I keep walking. Not because I believe the path cares, but because something in me needs to add my footprints to the rest, to say: I was here, I passed through, I moved across this small corner of the world. Even if the wind erases me, even if the rain washes me away, even if no one remembers that I came, the path will have known. And that seems, somehow, enough.