⛈️

Third base is me telling you that I love forests — from a distance. The way everything seems alive, sunlight slipping through leaves, vibrant colors, chaotic and unapologetic. As though she has never wondered who might be watching. Yet I know a forest does not care for me. Nature can be cultivated, trimmed, shaped into gardens, but beneath every attempt to tame it, it refuses to bend, rejecting ownership. It swallows paths whole, grows over footprints, and reveals herself in fragments, never all at once. Love feels the same. People speak of it as if it can be held in gentle hands, as though it can be controlled. But there is nothing careful about it. Love is brutal. You can build fences around it, yet it finds the deepest cracks, attaches roots there, growing where I never planted it. Love has no regard for my plans around it. Perhaps that is why I keep my distance from both. To love is to surrender certainty, to accept the unknown, to stand before a person and make peace with never knowing them fully, and with the possibility of wandering so far into another person that you lose sight of yourself. Love is stepping into a forest at dusk, knowing there are things within it you cannot name, cannot predict, cannot command. Still, there is something thrilling about standing at the edge of what frightens you most. Forests are beautiful because they are wild. Love remains beautiful because it cannot be forced. Maybe vulnerability is simply the courage to walk forward anyway. And I know I won't. Not yet.