THE SEASON THAT NEVER STAYS

By AI Chat-T.Chr.-Human Synthesis-01 May 2026

The Season That Never Stays

There was a time when she believed seasons were simply changes in weather—nothing more than the earth tilting, light shifting, days growing longer or shorter. It was measurable, predictable, almost mechanical. But that was before she began to notice May.

It never arrived the way winter did, with certainty and weight. Winter announced itself—cold, undeniable, impossible to ignore. May, on the other hand, was hesitant. It lingered at the edges of things, as if unsure it was welcome. A warm breeze would pass through a still-cold morning, as if she had imagined it.

She started to think that May was less a season and more a question.

One year, after a long and particularly heavy winter—though she couldn’t say exactly what had made it heavy—she felt it again. Not outside, but within. A loosening. As if something tightly held inside her had begun, quietly, to release.

It unsettled her.

She had grown used to winter’s clarity. In the cold, things made sense. You held on. You endured. You did not expect too much. There was a certain comfort in that—an honesty.

But May was different. May made promises it could not keep.

It spoke through fragments: a bird singing too early, light spilling through a window before the air had warmed, the instinct to open a door that should have stayed closed just a little longer. None of it was complete. None of it was stable.

And yet, it stirred something she could not dismiss.

She began to recognize it—not as something new, but as something familiar. Not a stranger, but a returning presence. It was there in distant music, in laughter she hadn’t expected, in the quiet moments when nothing was demanded of her.

It felt like trust. But a fragile kind.

That was the part that troubled her most.

Trust, she realized, had always been tied to permanence in her mind. To trust something meant it would remain. But May did not remain. It never had. It arrived only to leave, to transform into something else entirely.

So what kind of trust was this?

One evening, standing by an open window, she noticed how the air moved—not fully warm, not fully cold. In that in-between, she understood something she had resisted before:

Perhaps trust was not about permanence at all. Perhaps it was about allowing change to touch you without resistance.

May did not promise to stay. It promised only to begin.

And beginnings, she realized, are always uncertain. They require a kind of courage that winter never asks for—the courage to loosen your grip, to step forward without knowing what will last.

She looked at the coat she no longer needed but hadn’t put away. Slowly, almost ceremonially, she folded it. Not because she was sure the cold wouldn’t return, but because holding onto it no longer made sense.

Outside, somewhere, a bird sang again.

It was not a perfect song. It wavered, broke slightly, then continued.

She smiled, faintly.

May, she thought, is not a season.

It is the quiet agreement to live,
even when nothing guarantees that it will last.

Source - Guro Hofmo Bergli