They met here for the first time many years ago. Not by design, but by coincidence. A late afternoon, the air still warm, the path scattered with golden leaves. She had been photographing the trees. He was passing through on his way to the train. A shared glance beneath the crimson canopy, a few words, nothing more.
A year later, around the same time, they cross paths again in the park. Another coincidence, or maybe not. They talked longer that day. Walked a little farther together. From that point on, neither missed a year.
So they returned. Not out of tradition, but out of something gentler: a quiet agreement with time. They walked the path each year not to mark the past, but to meet the present more fully, to witness what had changed: in the city, in the trees, in themselves… and what remained constant.
The torii gates were only thresholds. What mattered was what lay beyond them: the hush of gravel underfoot, the drift of leaves, the soft glow of lanterns flickering on before the sky had fully darkened. Here, it seemed as if the world didn’t ask for anything. It simply allowed them to be.
They spoke little. The silence wasn’t absence, but fullness: the kind shared by those who have nothing to prove, who understand that some bonds are not measured by words, but by presence across time.
As the sun dipped low and the trees burned gently against the dusk, they reached the end of the path. They didn’t need to say goodbye.
The season would call them again.