Unrooted Relationship

We went for a hike this weekend on a trail that should have been easy. The kind of path that winds through quiet woods, dappled light, the soft crunch of leaves underfoot. It should have been simple. Restorative, even. Instead I spent half the walk watching my feet like a stranger learning to walk again.

The dizziness came first—subtle at first, then insistent. That familiar off-kilter feeling that makes the world tilt just enough to matter. My balance has never fully returned since the injury. Some days I can almost pretend it’s normal. Other days the ground feels unreliable, like it might shift without warning. And the roots… those tree roots that used to be nothing more than texture under my shoes now wait like tripwires. One wrong placement of weight, one moment of the horizon scanning, and I’m down. Not dramatically. Just a hard, clumsy fall that leaves my palms scraped and my pride somewhere in the dirt.

I sat there longer than I needed to, hand on my hiking pole, waiting for the spinning to slow. The woods didn’t care. Birds kept calling. Light kept shifting. But something in me stayed on the ground a little longer than the fall required.

It is hard not to see the parallel.

After the injury, certain friendships—and some of the closest family ties—simply stopped. No big argument. No dramatic rupture I can point to and explain. Just a quiet fading. Choices they've made to cut out asking to be left alone. Calls that went unanswered. Plans that never materialized. The easy, assumed closeness every single day before that once felt as natural as breathing became something I had to watch carefully, like my own footing on that trail. Now, there’s been nothing every day for years. I kept waiting for the ground to feel solid again between us. It never quite did.

Maybe they didn’t know how to stay. Maybe the version of me that needed more patience, more understanding, more time to recalibrate was harder to walk beside. Maybe they just decided they'd rather be cruel than the person they used to be in all their relationships. Or maybe the dizziness of watching someone change—physically, emotionally, in the small daily ways an injury rewrites a person—made them step back without fully realizing they were doing it. I still don’t have a clean answer. Only the fact of the absence still today.

What surprises me is how similar the two experiences feel in the body. The sudden loss of equilibrium. The way you start scanning the path ahead for hazards you used to ignore. The quiet grief of realizing that some surfaces you trusted will no longer hold your weight the same way. You learn to move differently. More deliberately. You start choosing trails with fewer roots, or walking more slowly, or accepting that some days you will fall and have to get back up.

I don’t know if those relationships will ever feel steady again. Some losses stay losses. But the hike taught me something small and useful: the roots are still there whether I trip on them or not. The dizziness still comes. What changes is how long I stay down, and whether I keep walking anyway—scraped palms, careful steps, and all.

Some paths are harder now. That doesn’t mean they aren’t still mine to walk.