Page 70 of Trapped with the Forest Ranger
Fierce. Final. Unshakable.
The boarding call crackles overhead.Final call for Sydney.
I should move. Instead, I breathe.
My feet don’t obey. Not at first. Because leaving doesn’t feel triumphant—it feels like peeling off skin. Like walking away from warmth into an endless wind.
Still, I do what he told me.
I shoulder my bag. Step forward. Take my place in line.
Sometimes love isn’t about staying.
Sometimes love is letting go… and trusting what comes back.
Inside, the plane is freezing. A frigid, sterile cold, different from the mountain wind. It creeps through steel and fiberglass and into my spine, but it doesn’t numb me. Nothing could—not after the way he touched me. Not after the way he made me feel.
I sink into my seat, tugging my hoodie over my head. I close my eyes and pretend I’m breathing him in—pine, smoke, sweat, sex.
Once we’re in the air, I keep my window shades down. I feel the vastness of the sky just beyond them and the distance stretching between me and the only man who’s ever seen me, not just with eyes, but with soul-deep certainty. I don’t have to see it to make it feel real.
The air in the cabin smells like recycled nothing, but I swear I can still catch pine sap and firewood, and the scent of his flannel tangled in my hair.
I press my forehead to the window and breathe.
Australia hits like a punch to the senses.
Jet lag clings to me like a second skin. The air in Sydney is thick and hot, tinged with eucalyptus, dust, and a faint metallic scent in the soil.
The sun is relentless. The heat has teeth, and the humidity crawls along my skin like invisible fingers. Everything feels louder here—the calls of magpies echoing like laughter, car horns sharper and more urgent, cicadas drone like static turned up too loud, and even the rustle of the leaves sounds like whispers I can’t quite decipher.
The colors here are all wrong and utterly perfect—deep rusts, sun-bleached greens, birdsin shades that belong in paintings, not real life. It’s a photographer’s dream, but I can’t enjoy it.
The first days are a blur. Jet lag clings to me. I hike through scrubland with my camera strapped across my chest like armor. The locals are kind but distant.
I don’t blame them—I’m brittle. Quiet.
Distant in ways I don’t yet have a language for.
But I’m shooting. Constantly.
And somethingisdifferent.
I can’t describe it, except to saythe work flows.
My hands are steady. My eye is clear. There’s a sharpness in how I frame each shot—a rawness I couldn’t access before.
Everything inside me is cracked open and pouring out into the lens. Shaping each shot into magic.
I send in my first batch of photos to my editor.
The email pings two hours later:“These are phenomenal. Are you possessed?”
I smile.
No. Not possessed.
Caleb and I speak when we can. Time zones and terrain conspire against us, but when his name lights up my screen, it’s like there’s breath in my lungs again.
