Cathedral of Trees

I wait for you in the woods, where the trees can hold our secret in the crooks of their limbs. The leaves whisper overhead, cradling the hush of us, nurturing something too fragile for the world outside. They nurture the thought of us into reality.

I don’t think we live in reality — do you?

You pull me into some other world when you’re near. A world where the air feels thicker, sweeter. Where the laws of time forget to apply. A world I never knew existed until your mouth said my name like it belonged somewhere holy.

The early spring hums around me — bugs darting in and out of the last golden light, wings catching the dusk like tiny stained-glass windows. The sun leans low, spilling the last of itself across the forest floor. The warmth hangs by a thread, tugging at the edges of my skin.

You’re not here yet.

Last night, you told me goodnight and sweet dreams, soft and slow, like a promise tied with threadbare hope.

I said my dreams would be sweet, and yet — I only laid awake, haunted by the idea of dreaming of you. Of missing something I never fully had.

The woods sing their own song: the liquid notes of the stream slipping over stones, the shrill insistence of spring peepers calling for someone to find them, to need them.

I sit very still, letting it all pour over me until my mind is scraped clean. Until I am nothing but a listening thing, hollowed out and ringing like a struck bell.

The roots beneath me pulse like veins, like they know something I don’t. They whisper that this love — whatever this is — is a sin stitched too deep to pull free.

Unforgivable.

Unlovable.

Unrelenting.

My body curls in on itself, forgetting why it ever dared to hope. A boy born to love, now swearing to die alone in a cathedral of trees. My muscles betray me, sagging under the weight of nothing.

Of waiting.

But then, they stiffen. Harden.

Angry now, brutal in their new understanding.

This is not where love lives.

This is where it comes to rot.

I dream of you differently now in these woods.

Less like a boy, more like a mirage. Something the sun pulled out of the mist and draped in human skin.

You had all the right shapes, all the right smiles.

You built a house with no foundation, draped sheets over emptiness and called it home.

I was so ready to believe you.

The worst part?

You never even had to lie to me. You just had to show up, and I did the rest. I embroidered the words you never said. I made you into someone you never asked to be.

The stream gurgles on, tireless and sure of its path, while I sit cross-legged in the mud, unsure of anything at all.

The day folds itself into a blue-tinged darkness.

I don’t know when I’ll stand up.

Maybe I never will.

Maybe I’ll let the earth take me.

Let my bones braid themselves into the roots.

Let the memory of you leach out of me like rainwater soaking the soil.

You turn my world upside down.

I should have known better, you were never really there. You lived halfway in the air, and I was fool enough to try and tether you to the ground.

I won’t gift you the satisfaction of my hurt, wrapped neatly in trembling hands.

If losing you is the last thread of control I have left, then I will braid it into armor.

Maybe we aren’t meant to be tangible at all.

Maybe we were made unbound — stitched together from divinity before anyone taught us how to be afraid. Held once by something bigger than us, something kinder. And then cast down, forced to forget.

Maybe we are meant to love recklessly.

To burn like fallen stars with nothing to lose.

To understand what our bones scream for in the dead of night —

And to become beasts, beautiful and terrible, in pursuit of it.

Maybe it’s not a tragedy to live in cycles.

To fall, and rise, and fall again.

To let our tender skin grow calloused, then strip it bare once more.

To unlearn all the ways the world tried to teach us we were wrong to love this much.

This fiercely.

Maybe the truest thing we’ll ever do is keep choosing love anyway.

Even when it costs us everything.