The door remained open, and the mountain stood watch around the valley, patient and enduring, older than grief, older than loneliness, older than all the small and stubborn acts of love that human beings build against the cold, but no more permanent than any of them.

Because mountains erode and rivers shift and empires rise and fall.

But the choice to stay, the choice to love, the choice to open a door that could so easily remain locked, that choice made freely and repeated daily, is the one thing in this world that endures.

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