The Quiet Season(Micro-stories)
- Lyia Meta - My Ink Bleeds
- Aug 22
- 2 min read
Foreword
by Lyia Meta
It’s no secret that I’ve always been a sucker for period dramas and timeless classics. One story that has stayed with me through the years is Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. I didn’t grow up watching movies as they were first released — with no Netflix or cable TV until much later, I only started discovering them long after their original run. Like following a trail of breadcrumbs, I’d stumble upon them piece by piece, often out of sequence but somehow always at the right moment.
Little Women was one such gem. My favorite character was Jo March — fiercely independent, ambitious, and unapologetically herself. I saw a little of myself in her. The first version I remember watching was the 1994 adaptation with Winona Ryder. From there, I began to seek out the earlier ones — the 1949 film with June Allyson and Elizabeth Taylor, and eventually the 1933 version starring Katherine Hepburn. When Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation came along, it felt like a full-circle moment.
What is it about *Little Women*, and Jo especially, that makes this story so enduring? Maybe it’s their quiet strength, their resilience in the face of hardship, or their fierce familial love. Whatever it is, the story left its imprint on me — one that resonates even now, rerun after rerun, each time revealing something new.
This micro story is a small nod to that inspiration — the timeless pull of stories that speak to our truest selves, no matter how late we arrive at their door.
The Quiet Season
—a woman unfolding
She never needed frills or attention. Her world was quiet — measured in the weight of a pen, the softness of paper, the steady rhythm of her breath.
That winter, she began a journal. Not to explain herself, but to hold the small, unspoken moments slipping past — fragile stirrings without names.
"Frost draws lace on the window — delicate and unyielding,” she wrote. "Tracing invisible lines between what is and what might be.”
In that same season, there was someone else — a boy who came and went like a shadow on the edge of vision. Not sought, not welcomed. His presence unsettled her quietly, like the last leaf clinging to a barren branch.
No words passed between them. No shared glance. Only a weight — not of him, but of absence.
“It is not his name I remember, but the space he left behind,” she wrote.
The journal held her unguarded self — the version not shown, but slowly emerging in the cold light of winter.
She learned becoming is not a sudden blaze, but a quiet unfolding — a tracing of invisible lines, a gathering of moments.
Years later, she would return to that season — to the frost, the silence, the weight of absence — and remember when she first met herself.
by Lyia Meta
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