Stories Told Through Symbols 🌿

About the Apple and the Abyss

A girl is resting in the shade of an apple tree.

The tree grows on the very edge of a cliff, beneath which opens a chasm so deep that even light seems to vanish in it. It’s a beautiful, sunny day. Everything is steeped in quiet bliss: birds sing, the grass smells sweet, and for a moment the world feels completely at peace. Fallen apples lie beneath the tree. The girl picks one up and bites into it with the kind of delight you have when tasting your first meal after a long journey.

And then it happens.

A second self separates from her body—light, translucent, self-assured.

It glides out over the abyss and begins to dance. Soon, more figures join it: pale, ghostlike beings that resemble shades from ancient dreams. They drift around her, tatters of fabric in the wind, and yet their dance has a strange, uncanny grace. The twin senses none of their eeriness. She is enchanted. She smiles with that blissful expression people wear when they finally switch off their mind and let themselves be carried by the current.

The shades aren’t here by accident. Something has called them—perhaps a dance step, the joyful laughter of the girl’s second self… or merely the quiet, unspoken thought of the girl beneath the tree. She sits there eating her apple, unaware of the dancer above the void.

That’s when a boy with a flute appears by the tree.

He leans against the trunk and begins to play a simple, cheerful melody. His presence startles the girl, yet it pleases her as well. What she doesn’t know is that he isn’t looking at her—he’s playing for the dancer above the abyss, the one she herself cannot see. Only when the flute falls silent does the second self slowly return to the girl’s body, gently, as if it had never existed at all.
But something has changed.

The lightness that had been on her face just moments ago has vanished, and a shadow settles in her eyes. Wordlessly, she takes a wicker basket and begins gathering apples. Carefully, almost ceremonially, until the basket is filled to the brim.
The boy reaches out and takes a single apple. Just one. The girl nods quietly, but a hollowness opens in her chest—because that one is the one she will miss. And sometimes the single thing that’s missing hurts more than everything that remains.

They set off toward the town together. The boy walks lightly, and the girl follows him with the basket, which feels heavier with every step. She stops, breathes with difficulty, and finally catches up to him. She asks him to return the apple. He refuses to give back a gift, and a fierce argument erupts. Sharp words stir the peaceful afternoon air.

And then… the girl begins to grow.
In an instant, she is taller than the trees, taller than the houses, taller than the entire town.

Her consciousness soars upward into a place where baskets and apples no longer exist.

She floats above the abyss and feels no fear—she knows nothing can harm her. She carries within her a peace that cannot be described, only experienced.

And then she returns.
She is once again lying in the shade of the old apple tree, as if none of that dreamlike moment had ever happened.

She smiles softly—the smile of someone who understands.
And bites into her apple.