My Beloved Green, My Eternal Love, My Endless Devotion

Finding where we belong in the timber and the stone

Photo by Deva Darshan on Unsplash

**Read For Free 🤍**

I didn’t choose a lover who could fit inside a room. I chose a body made of ancient slopes, cold pine needles, and high stone ridges that stay frozen until the morning opens up above us.

When I lay my chest flat against you, the ridges don’t just sit there. I can feel your whole mountain range thudding beneath me — a slow, deep rhythm that moves so deeply it feels like a secret shared only between our bodies.

You are the chest I lean into. Your trees are the heartbeat itself, millions of them pushing up out of the dark earth like veins, vibrating every time the wind drags its heavy fingers through your canopy.

When the storm picks up, your heartbeat quickens, branches groaning and thrashing against each other in a sudden, wild pulse of passion.

And when the mist settles over your ridges, the heartbeat drops into a flat, heavy silence that matches the numbness inside my own skin.

It is a constant, rhythmic thrumming that doesn’t care if the rest of the world is listening; you beat entirely for us, holding up the sky with every rise and fall of your timber.

The wind comes down from the gaps in the stone, and I get pulled into the center of the floor.

Dancing with the trees is a heavy, crushing sort of beautiful. It leaves an ache in my ribs because I am trying to hold onto something that has no end.

My arms go up because the branches go up, creaking and snapping under the weight of the gale, and I lean back against the trunk to feel the wood bend with me—a massive, ancient body moving in absolute lockstep with my own small breath.

My boots slip in the rotting mulch, and the wet leaves sting my cheeks, but the sadness hits me right in the center of my throat.

It’s the grief of my own short human lifespan. I realize I am moving with a lover who was dancing a hundred years before I was born and will still be swaying in the dark a hundred years after I am buried in the dirt.

It breaks my heart because the love is too vast for my tiny ribs to contain, a fierce, eternal devotion that leaves me bruised and weeping into the bark simply because I cannot stay forever.

The sea isn’t just water; it is a tongue that tastes of salt and iron. It crashes against my ribs, pulling the breath straight out of my lungs and replacing it with the freezing tide, leaving me shivering on the shore with my skin tasting like the deep.

The ocean is the fluid, rushing blood of my lover, heavy and dark and constantly pulling me under, demanding that I give up trying to stand on my own two feet and just let the current take my weight.

The waves hit the rocks with the same steady, dull thud as the mountain pulse, a secondary heartbeat that works the edges of the land, grinding the stone into sand over centuries while I watch from the cliffs.

The sky is an old, stained wool blanket pulled over the peaks when the sun finally drops. It changes color because it is changing its weight above me.

The clouds are just the heavy, misted breaths I leave behind in the morning chill, hanging low in the valleys because the earth isn’t ready to let them go yet.

Sometimes the sky is clear and cold, a wide, unblinking eye that watches me without judgment.

Other times it grows dark and bruised, pressing down so low that I can feel the moisture on my eyelashes, a lover leaning in so close that I can’t see anything else.

A deer moving quietly through the thicket isn’t an isolated creature; it is a sudden, sharp pulse under the skin of the forest.

A hawk cutting through the gray air is a brief, fleeting memory passing from one ridge to another.

The insects humming in the damp grass are the small, nervous vibrations of a mind that never sleeps.

When the owls call at night, it is just my lover talking to themselves in the dark, using the hollows of the trees to echo a voice that doesn’t need words.

The foxes scratch at the dirt, the beetles chew through the fallen logs, and every tiny movement is just a nerve twitching inside the giant, sleeping mass.

The sun is the warmth of their skin when they finally turn toward me, a heavy, blinding heat that bakes the pine needles until the air smells like resin and old earth.

But it doesn’t stay. This lover doesn’t promise constant warmth.

They show their devotion by staying exactly where they are when the cold comes.

They watch me freeze, they watch me go numb, and they just keep rolling the fog over the hills, offering nothing but a vast, silent space to hold the things I don’t know how to say out loud.

This lover doesn’t ask me to finish my sentences. They don’t look at me and wait for me to fix my posture or make sense of the years that were cut off mid-sentence.

They don’t mind that I am unpolished, or that parts of me feel entirely stuck.

When it rains, they don’t run for cover. They just let the water hit the dirt, turning the ground slick and heavy, knowing that the dampness will eventually sink through the leather of my shoes and make me part of the mud, too.

It’s a rough, eternal kind of devotion, the kind that doesn’t try to fix me, but simply opens its arms and lets me sink into its gravity.

In the evening, when the light hits the dirt in those sharp, cold patches where the trees leave a gap, I don’t look at the landscape anymore.

I don’t look at them.

I am inside them. I just put my ear flat against the granite, close my eyes, and listen to the whole world breathe.

Thank you Supriya for this beautiful challenge to write about my forever love 🌿🌼♥️