We are forests

Dense, ancient, crossed by paths only it knows — and some even it does not. Inside are dark places, beasts that keep away from the light, sudden clearings of beauty. There are fallen trees no one saw fall and ground that has never felt a stranger's step.

When two people meet, they step out of their own forests and stand in front of one another. They look. They speak. They brush against each other. But behind each of them the forest remains — intact, inaccessible, mute. And of that forest we know nothing. We can know nothing.

That is the first thing I understood about love, or about what for years I called by that name.

For a long time I camped outside a forest that was not mine.

I can't tell you exactly when I pitched the tent, or why there of all places. I know that something — a look, a gesture, the quality of a certain kind of attention — had convinced me there was something inside that forest that concerned me. Something waiting.

So I stayed.

I lit a fire. I tended it every day, with the quiet care of someone who has nothing else to hold on to. I kept it burning and it helped me speak with my demons, with the waiting, with everything I could not say out loud. Outside, nothing happened. The forest remained a forest — still, indifferent, beautiful.

There were nights that destroyed everything. Wind, rain, the fire extinguished, the shelter torn apart. Every time I rebuilt. Every time I began waiting again. Not out of romantic stubbornness — or at least that is what I told myself — but because I did not know how to do anything else. Because that forest had become my horizon, and without a horizon you don't know where to look.

Then, one day, I gave up.

It wasn't a dramatic decision. It was slow, quiet, almost painless — like when a fire dies down without you noticing and you suddenly find yourself staring at embers. I stopped feeding it. I let it go out. I stood up, turned around and started walking.

That is when I saw the flame.

It was coming from inside the forest. Faint, almost shy, but unmistakable. Someone inside had lit a fire. For me.

I stopped. The ground beneath my feet stopped feeling familiar. I felt something I can only call wonder — that mixture of awe and terror that takes hold of you when reality exceeds what you imagined and you still don't know whether it is a gift or a trap.

I entered the forest.

I walked carefully, sensing the beasts around me — the ones that are always waiting for the first wrong step. But I did not stop. The fire grew closer, clearer. And when I finally came out the other side, there she was — and the fire she had lit for me.

She had seen me. She had noticed. She had answered.

I should have been happy. After all that time, after all those years keeping the fire alive, I should have felt something loosen inside me — a gentle surrender, an arrival.

Instead, something inside me did not fit.

It was subtle, almost imperceptible, but real. Like a wrong note inside a perfect chord. Like something that does not add up, something you cannot name but your body recognizes before your mind does.

It took me time to understand what it was.

Years of longing had not been knowledge. They had been construction. I had built an imagined forest inside me — its contours, its clearings, the quality of the light between its branches. But that forest was mine, not hers. It was the projection of what I hoped for, not a map of what existed.

When I finally entered the real forest, I found something different. Not worse, not better — different. And that difference was the truth: I had never known that forest. I had only imagined it. Between those two things lies an abyss no light from any fire can cross.

I pushed her away. And I have never felt pain so precise in my life.

Not the pain of absence — I knew that one well. The pain of conscious renunciation. The pain of saying no to what you want because you have understood that what you want is not what exists.

We are forests, after all.

We cannot force anyone out of their forest. We cannot claim to truly know it — not even when we camp outside it for years, not even when we enter. We can only light a fire and hope the other person sees it. We can only walk carefully when we are given permission to enter.

And sometimes — this is the part no one tells you — sometimes we come out the other side and discover that our own forest has changed in the meantime. That we are no longer who we were when we lit the fire. That the longing was real, but it belonged to a version of us that no longer lives in the same forest.

The hardest no is not the one we say to other people.

It is the one we say to ourselves when we understand that we had built everything — everything — on the wrong map.