A hospital nurse told me recently:
“After COVID, I don’t feel well anymore.
I think I’ve developed the illness of being too sensitive.”
Her words took me back to those end-of-the-world days of the pandemic —
days when some who existed before
were simply not after.
She carried the silent trauma of caregivers:
the wound that comes from feeling too much, for too long.
When I hung up, I was eating a persimmon
and suddenly remembered the little vegetarian café
beside the counseling center where I once worked —
a café that no longer exists.
There was a sign under a persimmon tree:
“Please do not touch the fruit.”
I still remember that quiet temptation —
the human ache to pluck what we shouldn’t.
I never did.
I only took pictures —
of the tree,
of the cats that came to drink from the pond,
and of the small beauty of a world before the virus.
Back then, no one yet knew
that too much kindness can also become a cage —
soft, golden,
and made of need.
🌱 Sometimes the forbidden fruit
is not what we take —
but what we keep longing for.
